My Clippings

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (Jonas Jonasson)
- Your Highlight on page 3 | location 36-36 | Added on Monday, 3 April 2017

11:59:57
hesitated
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The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (Jonas Jonasson)
12:00:14
hesitated as he stood there in the flower bed that ran along one side of the Old
Folks’ Home. He was wearing a brown jacket with brown trousers and on his feet he
had a pair of brown indoor slippers.
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Models - A Comprehensive Guide to Attracting Women (Mark Manson)
23:23:33
why I was sacrificing so much time and effort to such superficial pleasures.
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23:24:26
They say if you want to master something, teach it.

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23:27:42
Your failures happen because you grew up emotionally ill-equipped to deal with
women and intimacy. The words you say and looks you have are merely a side-effect
of that.
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23:30:55
Until you learn to trust your own actions and learn to pursue women with your own
unique style and personality, you have learned absolutely nothing.
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23:32:35
Our culture has become stationary.

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- Your Highlight on page 10 | location 145-146 | Added on Tuesday, 4 April 2017
07:49:36
A beautiful girl in California is almost always beautiful in New York, Tokyo, New
Delhi, Beirut and Oslo.
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07:50:15
In fact, women and what attracts and arouses them can be maddeningly unpredictable,
contradictory and whimsical.
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07:53:33
Not only did she come to no conclusions, but she lamented that the experiment only
presented more questions about female sexuality than she began with.
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07:57:46
As a man, you don’t have to actually be rich and famous, you just have to show a
lot of potential for being rich and famous to be considered extremely attractive.
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08:00:19
Women are turned on by being wanted, by being desired.

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08:00:55
What they want is to be desired. They want to be desired to the point that a man
loses complete self-control.
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08:03:11
I found that the more I focused on my business and financial success with women I
met, the more quickly they would want to get into a relationship with me. Whereas
years prior, when I had been broke and living on my friend’s couch, women just
wanted to have sex with me.
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08:15:25
By investment I mean the degree in which you sacrifice/alter your own

thoughts/feelings/motivations for someone else.
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08:19:46
The minute he let’s her dominate him emotionally, he demonstrates a lack of status.
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10:29:50
Daniel’s story is a quintessential example of why pick up lines, routines, value

tactics and the like are only short-term solutions.
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10:32:54
I used to call these guys "fake alphas" but really they’re just guys over-
compensating by beating their chest a little too much.
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10:34:10
Both derive from a fundamental insecurity.

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10:38:02
The persona is actually a front, an act, a compensation, an emotional acting out

against the women who hurt him the past.
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10:40:51
This is why the classic pick up advice is all geared towards drunk party girls. The
type of women you will find drunk in a night club are most likely to be the highest
invested in sexual validation of any women you would normally meet.
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10:41:38
all people eventually return to their baseline levels of investment.

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13:58:46
On top of that, most of the popular pick up advice out there encourages guys to be
aloof, stand-offish, judgmental and at times scathing towards women.
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14:00:46
vulnerability represents a form of power, a deep and subtle form of power.

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14:05:47
When challenged, they stand up for themselves, but when wrong they also admit their
fault, as they see no reason to hide their weakness.
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23:48:54
Perhaps you haven’t exercised or groomed yourself to the extent that you could
because you didn’t want to stand out too much.
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23:49:46
we’ve grown up with habits embedded deeply into us to keep us stifled and bottled
up.
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23:51:18
Vulnerability is the path of true human connection and becoming a truly attractive
person.
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23:53:04
"The less you talk about your shame, the more of it you have."
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23:55:53
As you make yourself vulnerable, you will experience rejection. And as you
experience rejection, you will be forced to upgrade your own sense of self worth.
There’s no other option.
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- Your Highlight on page 45 | location 680-681 | Added on Wednesday, 5 April 2017
00:00:32
"Hi, my name is Bill, I thought you were very beautiful and wanted to say hi."
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00:03:30
despite what every fiber of your being may be telling you, opening you thoughts,
actions and feelings up to being vulnerable actually defines attractive behavior by
men.
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00:05:17
There’s no shortcut. There are no tricks. You say it because you mean it and mean
it because you say it.
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00:05:40
The more nervous it makes you, the better, because it means you’re being authentic
and making yourself vulnerable.
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08:06:48
walking the tight-rope of pursuing her

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08:07:43
honestly demonstrating your interest in a woman short-circuits this issue. It’s a

loophole in the investment paradox.
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08:08:56
The fact that he honestly approached her with his intentions, that he puts his nuts
on the chopping block and makes himself vulnerable to her immediately, actually
sub-communicates a non-neediness and an attractiveness in itself.
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08:18:57
You can’t fake vulnerability and you can’t fake honesty.

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08:20:07
The only women you will manage to fake are women who are drunk or high or who are
extremely needy themselves. Truth.
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08:20:54
You cannot fake vulnerability. You cannot fake truth. Truth has to be a gift, given
with no conditions or expectations.
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08:26:49
When I tell a girl that she is beautiful, I say it not expecting anything in
return. Whether she rejects me or falls in love with me, what’s important is that
I’m expressing my feelings to her.
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08:27:03
I don’t use my compliments as a bargaining tool. I give them genuinely.

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08:28:37
will give compliments only when I am honestly inspired to give them, and usually
after already meeting a woman and displaying to her that I’m willing to disagree
with her, willing to be rejected by her and willing to walk away from her because
I’m not needy and therefore high status.
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08:28:48
When a compliment comes from a man seeking nothing in return, it’s a gift of truth,
a piece of his vulnerability and infinitely more powerful as a result.
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08:29:26
Paradoxically, seeking no investment from her will inspire her to invest that much
more in you.
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08:45:41
And when it is a gift, when it is honest, she recognizes and appreciates a man who
actually genuinely appreciates her.
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10:59:30
I would have told her flat out that if she wasn’t excited to be on a date with me,
then I’d rather her save us both the time and not show up.
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11:04:55
Men who are not needy establish strict boundaries because they value their own time
and happiness more than receiving the attention from a woman.
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11:08:20
What I discovered is that there was not anything objectively better or more
interesting about these girls.
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11:08:36
what I was chasing was status, a pat on the back, basically reliving and redeeming
all of my failed high school moments where the pretty girls didn’t pay attention to
me.
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11:13:19
You must become comfortable with the idea of being inexperienced and be comfortable
admitting that insecurity if you wish to gain a lot of experience.
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11:17:16
The importance of therapy is to remember that it’s a tool, not a solution.

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11:18:25
Enacting these behaviors and becoming more aware of your emotions while you’re
doing them should help you down the road to permanent change.
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11:19:57
Friction is when a woman finds you to be an attractive man but there are external
circumstances that prevent her from acting on that attraction or being interested
in you.
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11:23:38
They will accuse you of being demanding, overbearing, horny, untrustworthy, or

weak. These accusations will have little to no bearing on reality, and a non-needy
man will either walk away from a girl like this or simply ignore her accusations.
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11:24:52
Incompatibility is a fact of life. No matter how you behave or what you’re into,
the majority of women out there are simply not going to be interested.
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13:03:19
Rejection exists for a reason -- it’s a means to keep people who are not good for
each other apart.
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13:04:39
It’s not practice if she’s not hot, it’s desperation.

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13:22:28
Remember, women tend to be less invested in sex, and they expect men to initiate in
the beginning.
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13:27:43
a man who does not act on his sexual urges is a man who is needy and therefore
unattractive.
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14:25:09
Why you would put the effort to incite a high school drop out with an alcohol
problem to become interested in you is beyond me.
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14:42:39
And if you treat it like a treasure hunt, it can actually become pretty fun.
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14:45:32
Each woman is a concoction of flavors, whipped together into her own unique
personality and style. What we do as men is taste-test them. Many of them will be
gross. Some of them will be interesting but not very good. Some of them we will
love but will be bad for us. Others we’ll love and never want to stop drinking. The
goal is to find that magical combination that we never want to stop drinking. But
before that, we have to go through hundreds of other combinations…
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14:47:48
And therefore, when things don’t go anywhere, the men take it personally — they get
upset, or angry or butt-hurt that this random stranger with tits isn’t interested
right now.
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14:48:26
Instead of thinking, "I wonder if she’ll like me," think, "I wonder what she’s
like?" Instead of thinking, "I hope she doesn’t reject me," think, "I wonder if
we’ll have an adventure together?"
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14:54:50
Ironically, it’s this same complete lack of personal responsibility and complete
lack of self-awareness that is unable to accept feedback that drives the women away
from them.
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15:41:51
The first way of expressing our truth involves developing a lifestyle that makes us
happy. The second way of expressing truth is by being courageous and fighting
through our fears and anxieties. And the third way of expressing truth is by
communicating well and being uninhibited in our sexuality.
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15:43:39
You’ve compromised your identity in some way to fit what others have dictated it
should be -- in this case, you’ve given up what actually makes you happy in order
to fit the values or roles of other people in society (having a stable job, working
in the corporate world, having a nice house/car, etc.) This displays a lack of
vulnerability and a lot of neediness.
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16:01:32
If you’re standing in a bar, and you see a cute girl, and you keep looking at her
all night afraid to do something, on a deep level, you’re being dishonest to your
intentions and sexuality. You’re being needy and unable to expose your
vulnerability.
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16:01:52
If you’re afraid to approach a woman, it’s because somewhere in you you are more
invested in her opinion of you than you are of yourself.
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- Your Highlight on page 101 | location 1543-1544 | Added on Wednesday, 5 April
2017 16:07:37
the Three Fundamentals are interdependent

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2017 16:09:10
Anxious guys are TOO aware of what other people are thinking and feeling and
therefore have a lot of social anxiety. They’re afraid to approach. They get
nervous pushing things forward, they’re scared to ask girls on dates.
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2017 16:12:47
“Man sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices his money to
recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not
enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the
future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really
lived.”- The Dalai Lama
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2017 16:14:38
That some books would give these men the exact same lines or strategies to use just
goes to show how completely out of tune a lot of men’s dating advice and pick up
theory is today.
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2017 16:22:13
These are the cold, hard facts. Nobody probably tells you this. But it’s obvious
and it’s true. Sorry. The examples are endless. But this explains why sometimes you
meet women you just “click” with, and more often than not, you meet these women in
situations that you’re having fun and doing what you love.
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2017 16:51:44
humans are hardwired to be attracted to members of the opposite sex who have
similar physical traits as themselves.
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2017 16:56:52
The concept of social proof comes from influence psychology and is the idea that as
humans, when we see many other people valuing something, we will unconsciously
value it ourself. For instance, if everybody else is talking about a new movie, we
are more likely to want to see it because we’ll unconsciously assume that it’s a
good or important movie to see.
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2017 17:07:35
Any sort of drive or need to have sex with the most beautiful women for the sake of
sex with beautiful women and not for the sake of seeking joy, love and connection
is a purely selfish endeavor.
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2017 17:10:04
“Tell the beautiful girls they’re smart and tell the smart girls that they’re
beautiful.”
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2017 17:14:47
your life and everything that it encompasses, is a reflection of your emotional

investment in yourself. And the more invested you are in yourself, the less needy
you are with others.
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2017 18:26:07
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Vladmir
Nabokov, John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William
Faulkner,
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2017 18:35:39
Art has a higher purpose than entertainment. “The

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2017 18:40:36
In the end, working all day and night to have a great job and make a ton of money
is a very superficial satisfaction.
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2017 18:40:44
Enjoyment of life comes from varied life experience, not from possessions.
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2017 18:45:26
Well, honestly, I find it kind of admirable whenever somebody finds something they
value so much they’re willing to stand on the street all day in hopes that they can
share that something with one person. That’s pretty cool.
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2017 18:47:05
Poor lifestyle choices reflect a lack of investment in yourself, which in turn

causes you to be more needy around others for validation.
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2017 18:47:46
There’s a certain baseline level of independence and self-sufficiency that your

lifestyle must give you for you to be able to move forward.
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- Your Highlight on page 168 | location 2573-2574 | Added on Thursday, 6 April 2017
10:38:34
put in my time. I paid my dues. A lot of it was fun and a lot of it sucked and was
humiliating. But I did it. I grew.
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10:39:37
don’t even KNOW her. Yet I’m judging her. It’s a defense mechanism. My conscious
fear has disappeared, but my subconscious resistance is still alive and kicking.
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10:40:18
Over the years anxiety morphs into apathy which morphs into arrogance.
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10:43:08
These are my stories. They’re completely different now than they were three years
ago. And they were completely different three years ago than they were six years
ago. But they’ve all had the same purpose. To protect the status quo. My emotional
inertia.
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10:45:53
What’s important is that you move things forward without hesitation…

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10:54:50
We’re biologically wired to pursue women so at some point instinct will win over.
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11:00:50
end, your best teacher is your experience. There comes a certain point where
learning more about a subject is no longer beneficial and on the contrary, is just
going to get you more mixed up and confused, since you have no experience to
actually apply your knowledge to. Intellectualizing also ends up having a backlash.
Once you study a subject enough, it can actually increase your anxiety. By studying
it so much you’ve put more pressure on yourself to succeed and therefore build up
higher expectations for yourself.
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22:24:53
But you’re choosing to let those observations be responsible for your results,
because it’s easier to feel like the victim, to feel like that fucked up and cruel
world is short-changing you, rather than admit you just suck at something and
nobody else seems to care.
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- Your Highlight on page 178 | location 2728-2729 | Added on Saturday, 8 April 2017
09:41:02
Humans stereotype for a reason: so that we can manage large chunks of information
in order to orient ourselves more efficiently.
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09:41:58
Our minds are always looking for ways to avoid pain and failure and rejection, and
so they’re constantly churning out rationalizations to keep us impeccable;
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09:42:05
Blame is yet another form of investment and neediness.

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09:43:23
The recipe for a healthy and happy relationship is one where both partners take
responsibility for their own emotions and their choice to commit to the other.
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09:44:27
prefer to get girls into interesting conversations where I can show off my mental
gymnastics.
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09:47:30
This isn’t to say that stereotypes are always wrong. They’re not. Often there’s a
little bit of truth to them, otherwise they wouldn’t exist. But often there’s
little or no truth to them either. And often they end up doing more harm than good.
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09:48:49
It’s a way of shirking personal responsibility, and when you shirk personal
responsibility, you never improve, you never become more vulnerable, you never
become less needy.
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09:49:05
if you wish to improve at anything is to take full responsibility and

accountability of your results and your actions.
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09:57:04
Reinhold Niebuhr
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09:57:09
“God, grant me the serenity to accept things that I cannot change, the courage to
change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
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10:01:24
Often they would abstain from sex or masturbation for long periods of time and
would therefore feel more energized.
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10:12:24
The next time you approach, when she sees you coming — and trust me, she usually
sees you coming — know that she’s already rooting for you. Secretly, she wants you
to succeed as much as you do. And for a moment she’s your biggest fan.
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10:19:38
sub-communicating to everyone is in fact, how insanely high invested you are in

their attention.
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10:21:23
“What you resist will persist.”

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15:00:22
it’s important that you communicate that you realize what you’re doing is abnormal.
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15:00:44
“Excuse me, this is kind of random, but I thought you were cute and wanted to meet
you.”
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15:06:06
Teasing is done with a fun and positive intention. Insults are done with a negative
intention.
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15:07:32
Remember, women don’t see your features, they see how you present yourself. They
don’t hear your words, they hear your intentions.
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- Your Highlight on page 212 | location 3243-3244 | Added on Sunday, 9 April 2017
10:52:50
I encourage men to tease and flirt with all women intermittently -- even friends or
girls they’re not interested in. It adds a fun sexual component and sparks more
emotional excitement in any of your male/female relationships.
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10:56:19
teases immediately followed by sincere compliments. For instance, you could make
fun of how indecisive she is ordering her drinks and tell her that indecisiveness
isn’t going to lead her anywhere in life. When she responds with some indignation,
you could then compliment her on how beautiful her eyes are when she’s mad.
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22:50:25
It has a constant incessant harping on being the most attractive/alpha guy possible
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23:03:47
Everybody on this planet shares a handful of universal emotional realities:

ambition, shame, alienation, loneliness, achievement, regret, hardship, friendship,
love, heartbreak. We’ve all experienced it. The facts change, the feelings are the
samel. I don’t care how shallow or dumb or weird or annoying she is, she has it
somewhere in her. It’s your job to dig it out and connect with it. That’s where the
gold is. That’s where the real magic happens. Challenge yourself to find it.
Because once you do, you’ll never go back.
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23:08:25
“Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have
some conversation.”-
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23:10:19
The better our communication skills, the more clearly we can express ourselves and
show sexual interest.
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23:11:02
clear communication will enhance other areas of your life -- your professional
relationships, your family relationships, your friendships, your networking
abilities
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23:13:12
When in doubt on how to approach a woman, simply walk up and introduce yourself and
explain to her that you wanted to meet her.
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12:14:36
In conversation and communication quality always wins out over quantity.
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12:15:04
Nothing screams a lack of sophistication like somebody who sprinkles “like” and
“umm” throughout his stories constantly.
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12:15:52
Don’t speak like a robot either. You can still use all of the inflections, tonality
and pacing on the second sentence without having to drop “um” and “like” all the
time.
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12:16:27
lackadaisical,
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12:18:00
Questions are a polite way of requesting information of someone. They create the
frame that you desire something from her and she is obligated to fulfill your
request. But statements make it so that you’re constantly giving away information
and value to the other person.
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12:18:26
Statements give you a wider array of topics to choose from. Only broad questions
feel socially acceptable. Specific and eccentric questioning comes off as odd and
unattractive.
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12:20:26
It’s like being a psychic without the cheesiness.

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12:20:40
You don’t ask the question you want to know, but instead you make a mild
prediction.
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12:22:57
Instead of asking her a question about herself, you guess the answer to your
question and then state it. Here are some examples: “Where are you from?”
translates to: “You look like a California girl.”
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12:24:02
“How do you guys know each other?” translates to: “You guys look like you’ve been
friends for a long time.”
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12:24:18
Instead of asking her about herself, you’re TELLING her about herself.
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- Your Highlight on page 222 | location 3395-3396 | Added on Thursday, 13 April
2017 22:40:03
Communication is always up for interpretation, therefore there’s always going to be

a risk that you’re being misunderstood or people are assuming things about you.
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- Your Highlight on page 233 | location 3572-3572 | Added on Friday, 14 April 2017
07:38:23
the best communicators you know are fantastic story-tellers.

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Memories, Dreams, Reflections (C.G. Jung)
20:09:40
These are nothing but islands of memory afloat in a sea of vagueness, each by
itself, apparently with no connection between them.
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20:11:03
lay bathed in glowing sunset reds.

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20:12:27
At that time the idea became fixed in my mind that I must live near a lake; without
water, I thought, nobody could live at all.
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20:13:35
To this day I can remember my father’s voice, singing over me in the stillness of
the night.
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20:59:06
That is the handicap I started off with.
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21:00:34
anima.
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21:02:12
These things point to an unconscious suicidal urge or, it may be, to a fatal
resistance to life in this world.
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21:06:11
ruminations
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21:07:26
nefarious
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21:18:07
Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those
optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters,
crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next
morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded.
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The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (Mark Manson)
21:25:10
Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations:

Be happier. Be healthier. Be the best, better than the rest. Be smarter, faster,
richer, sexier, more popular, more productive, more envied, and more admired. Be
perfect and amazing and crap out twelve-karat-gold nuggets before breakfast each
morning while kissing your selfie-ready spouse and two and a half kids goodbye.
Then fly your helicopter to your wonderfully fulfilling job, where you spend your
days doing incredibly meaningful work that’s likely to save the planet one day.
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21:27:42
Why? My guess: because giving a fuck about more stuff is good for business.
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21:32:35
George Orwell said that to see what’s in front of one’s nose requires a constant
struggle.
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21:33:57
The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And,
paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive
experience.
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21:36:03
Albert Camus
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21:36:11
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of.
You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
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21:38:30
Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and
charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the
greatest trust and respect in your relationships.
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21:47:04
Mark Manson doesn’t care about adversity in the face of his goals,
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21:48:56
You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also
being a joke and an embarrassment to others.
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21:52:29
Rejections that were painful in the moment have actually worked out for the best.
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21:52:48
Essentially, we become more selective about the fucks we’re willing to give. This
is something called maturity.
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21:56:01
“practical enlightenment.”
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21:56:19
practical enlightenment as becoming comfortable with the idea that some suffering
is always inevitable—that no matter what you do, life is comprised of failures,
loss, regrets, and even death.
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- Your Highlight on page 23 | location 344-344 | Added on Sunday, 28 May 2017
19:43:59
“What you consider ‘friendship’ is really just your constant attempts to impress
people.”
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19:46:49
You also probably blame some poor inanimate object for your suffering. “Stupid
table,” you say. Or maybe you even go so far as to question your entire interior
design philosophy based on your throbbing foot: “What kind of idiot puts a table
there anyway? Seriously?”
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19:47:16
Physical pain is a product of our nervous system, a feedback mechanism to give us a

sense of our own physical proportions—where we can and cannot move and what we can
and cannot touch. When we exceed those limits, our nervous system duly punishes us
to make sure that we pay attention and never do it again.
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19:50:30
Like physical pain, our psychological pain is an indication of something out of

equilibrium, some limitation that has been exceeded.
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19:51:52
“The solution to one problem is merely the creation of the next one.”
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19:53:09
Happiness comes from solving problems.

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19:54:03
Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant

work-in-progress—the solutions to today’s problems will lay the foundation for
tomorrow’s problems, and so on. True happiness occurs only when you find the
problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.
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- Your Highlight on page 27 | location 412-414 | Added on Monday, 29 May 2017
23:21:18
Highs come in many forms. Whether it’s a substance like alcohol, the moral
righteousness that comes from blaming others, or the thrill of some new risky
adventure, highs are shallow and unproductive ways to go about one’s life.
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23:27:13
Much as the pain of touching a hot stove teaches you not to touch it again, the
sadness of being alone teaches you not to do the things that made you feel so alone
again.
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23:28:58
negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it’s because you’re
supposed to do something.
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- Your Highlight on page 29 | location 432-432 | Added on Tuesday, 13 June 2017
20:23:56
Emotions are merely signposts, suggestions that our neurobiology gives us, not
commandments.
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20:27:22
Most people want to have great sex and an awesome relationship, but not everyone is
willing to go through the tough conversations, the awkward silences, the hurt
feelings, and the emotional psychodrama to get there. And so they settle.
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20:31:46
I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process.
I was in love with not the fight but only the victory.
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- Your Highlight on page 43 | location 656-657 | Added on Thursday, 15 June 2017
01:05:12
They have their own stories and their own journeys and their own problems, just as
all parents do.
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01:10:59
The more freedom we’re given to express ourselves, the more we want to be free of
having to deal with anyone who may disagree with us or upset us. The more exposed
we are to opposing viewpoints, the more we seem to get upset that those other
viewpoints exist. The easier and more problem-free our lives become, the more we
seem to feel entitled for them to get even better.
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01:13:05
Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes of the bell curve of
human experience, because in the media business that’s what gets eyeballs, and
eyeballs bring dollars.
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01:13:20
This flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism

is the new normal.
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01:14:44
The problem is that the pervasiveness of technology and mass marketing is screwing
up a lot of people’s expectations for themselves. The inundation of the exceptional
makes people feel worse about themselves, makes them feel that they need to be more
extreme, more radical, and more self-assured to get noticed or even matter.
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01:16:54
A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they
accept it, they’ll never achieve anything, never improve, and that their life won’t
matter.
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01:18:12
“The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s
okay.” This vegetable course will taste bad at first. Very bad. You will avoid
accepting it.
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01:19:06
And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free
you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty
expectations. You will have a growing appreciation for life’s basic experiences:
the pleasures of simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need,
reading a good book, laughing with someone you care about.
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- Your Highlight on page 55 | location 841-842 | Added on Friday, 16 June 2017
15:48:48
But what he found when he returned to Japan horrified him: a consumerist,

capitalist, superficial culture that had lost all of the traditions of honor and
sacrifice upon which his generation had been raised.
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15:52:27
Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more you
peel them back, the more likely you’re going to start crying at inappropriate
times.
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15:59:32
Values underlie everything we are and do. If what we value is unhelpful, if what we
consider success/failure is poorly chosen, then everything based upon those values—
the thoughts, the emotions, the day-to-day feelings—will all be out of whack.
Everything we think and feel about a situation ultimately comes back to how
valuable we perceive it to be.
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18:46:07
People’s perceptions and feelings may change, but the underlying values, and the
metrics by which those values are assessed, stay the same. This is not real
progress. This is just another way to achieve more highs.
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- Your Bookmark on page 60 | location 918 | Added on Friday, 16 June 2017 18:49:28
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18:51:07
We’re apes. We think we’re all sophisticated with our toaster ovens and designer
footwear, but we’re just a bunch of finely ornamented apes. And because we are
apes, we instinctually measure ourselves against others and vie for status. The
question is not whether we evaluate ourselves against others; rather, the question
is by what standard do we measure ourselves?
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18:59:24
When people measure themselves not by their behavior, but by the status symbols
they’re able to collect, then not only are they shallow, but they’re probably
assholes as well.
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19:11:27
Denying negative emotions leads to experiencing deeper and more prolonged negative
emotions and to emotional dysfunction.
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19:11:41
Constant positivity is a form of avoidance, not a valid solution to life’s problems

—problems which, by the way, if you’re choosing the right values and metrics,
should be invigorating you and motivating you.
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19:13:33
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most
beautiful.”
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The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga (C G Jung)
19:20:50
We believe also that if any government deprives a people of these rights and
oppresses them, the people have the further right to alter it or to abolish it.
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- Your Highlight on page 76 | location 1154-1154 | Added on Saturday, 17 June 2017
12:00:15
To not give a fuck about anything is still to give a fuck about something.
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12:02:09
“With great responsibility comes great power.”

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- Your Highlight on page 78 | location 1187-1188 | Added on Sunday, 18 June 2017
09:57:45
This is the way fault works in our society: if you fuck up, you’re on the hook for
making it right. And it should be that way.
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10:00:15
Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense. Fault results from choices
that have already been made. Responsibility results from the choices you’re
currently making, every second of every day.
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10:17:59
I see life in the same terms. We all get dealt cards. Some of us get better cards
than others. And while it’s easy to get hung up on our cards, and feel we got
screwed over, the real game lies in the choices we make with those cards, the risks
we decide to take, and the consequences we choose to live with. People who
consistently make the best choices in the situations they’re given are the ones who
eventually come out ahead in poker, just as in life. And it’s not necessarily the
people with the best cards.
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- Your Highlight on page 87 | location 1323-1323 | Added on Monday, 26 June 2017
16:56:13
the short guy wanting to

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16:59:29
“outrage porn”: rather than report on real stories and

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16:59:55
Ryan Holiday refers to this as “outrage porn”: rather than report on real stories
and real issues, the media find it much easier (and more profitable) to find
something mildly offensive, broadcast it to a wide audience, generate outrage, and
then broadcast that outrage back across the population in a way that outrages yet
another part of the population. This triggers a kind of echo of bullshit pinging
back and forth between two imaginary sides, meanwhile distracting everyone from
real societal problems.
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17:00:02
Ryan Holiday refers to this as “outrage porn”: rather than report on real stories
and real issues, the media find it much easier (and more profitable) to find
something mildly offensive, broadcast it to a wide audience, generate outrage, and
then broadcast that outrage back across the population in a way that outrages yet
another part of the population. This triggers a kind of echo of bullshit pinging
back and forth between two imaginary sides, meanwhile distracting everyone from
real societal problems.
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17:06:29
Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we learn something new, we don’t go

from “wrong” to “right.” Rather, we go from wrong to slightly less wrong.
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17:10:18
how the story ends. Certainty is the enemy of growth. Nothing is for certain until
it has already happened—and even then, it’s still debatable.
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17:10:32
Certainty is the enemy of growth. Nothing is for certain until it has already
happened—and even then, it’s still debatable.
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17:10:59
Instead of looking to be right all the time, we should be looking for how we’re
wrong all the time. Because we are.
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17:15:28
used to think the human brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I
realized who was telling me this.”
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17:15:41
used to think the human brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I
realized who was telling me this.” The unfortunate fact is, most of what we come to
“know” and believe is the product of the
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17:15:47
“I used to think the human brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I
realized who was telling me this.” The unfortunate fact is, most of what we come to
“know” and believe is the product of the innate inaccuracies and biases present in
our brains.
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18:40:19
Evil people never believe that they are evil; rather, they believe that everyone
else is evil.
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19:08:46
Our values are imperfect and incomplete, and to assume that they are perfect and
complete is to put us in a dangerously dogmatic mindset that breeds entitlement and
avoids responsibility.
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19:13:13
say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps
you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments
and accepting of the differences in others.
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19:13:17
say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps
you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments
and accepting of the differences in others.
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19:13:38
Buddhism argues that your idea of who “you” are is an arbitrary mental construction
and that you should let go of the idea that “you” exist at all; that the arbitrary
metrics by which you define yourself actually trap you, and thus you’re better off
letting go of everything. In a sense, you could say that Buddhism encourages you to
not give a fuck.
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19:19:58
Aristotle wrote, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a

thought without accepting it.”
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06:47:45
Many described their lives before the war as if they’d been different people then:
ungrateful for and unappreciative of their loved ones, lazy and consumed by petty
problems, entitled to all they’d been given. After the war they felt more
confident, more sure
==========
06:47:53
confident, more sure of themselves, more grateful, and unfazed by life’s
trivialities and petty annoyances.
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- Your Note on page 120 | location 1837 | Added on Thursday, 29 June 2017 06:48:41
maybe the way British are feeling after their loss on nationalism
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06:49:50
We need some sort of existential crisis to take an objective look at how we’ve been
deriving meaning in our life, and then consider changing course.
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11:13:21
KFC bucket full of Rubik’s Cubes.

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- Your Highlight on page 120 | location 1835-1837 | Added on Sunday, 2 July 2017
11:48:45
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14:03:40
we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something.
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14:10:45
Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their
emotions for each other—in other words, they’re using each other as an escape.
Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems
with each other’s support.
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14:13:22
People can’t solve your problems for you. And they shouldn’t try, because that
won’t make you happy.
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- Your Highlight on page 145 | location 2212-2213 | Added on Monday, 3 July 2017
08:26:45
Trust is like a china plate. If you break it once, with some care and attention you
can put it back together again. But if you break it again, it splits into even more
pieces and it takes far longer to piece together again.
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08:28:03
When we’re overloaded with opportunities and options, we suffer from what
psychologists refer to as the paradox of choice.
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08:28:31
psychologists refer to as the paradox of
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08:28:37
opposite is true. We are actually often happier with less. When we’re overloaded
with opportunities and options, we suffer from what psychologists refer to as the
paradox of choice.
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08:28:42
psychologists refer to as the paradox of choice.
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08:31:25
there is a freedom and liberation in commitment.
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08:43:56
death is the light by which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured.
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08:44:13
Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all
metrics and values suddenly zero.
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08:46:07
The Denial of Death,

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08:47:26
“death terror,”
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08:49:00
in order to compensate for our fear of the inevitable loss of our physical self, we
try to construct a conceptual self that will live forever.
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08:49:28
“immortality projects,”
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08:50:59
What Becker is saying, in essence, is that we’re all driven by fear to give way too
many fucks about something, because giving a fuck about something is the only thing
that distracts us
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08:51:03
that distracts us
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08:51:07
that distracts us from the reality and inevitability of our own death.
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08:51:09
that distracts us from the reality and inevitability of our own death.
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08:55:54
The human body seems to come equipped with a natural radar for death-inducing
situations.
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09:00:09
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared
to die at any time.”
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09:01:09
Confronting the reality of our own mortality is important because it obliterates

all the crappy, fragile, superficial values in life.
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09:02:52
Death is the only thing we can know with any certainty. And as such, it must be the
compass by which we orient all of our other values and decisions.
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09:04:37
happiness comes from the same thing: caring about something greater than yourself,
believing that you are a contributing component in some much larger entity, that
your life is but a mere side process of some great unintelligible production.
==========
09:07:10
Bukowski once wrote, “We’re all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone
should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by
life’s trivialities; we are eaten up by nothing.”
==========
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (Peter Hessler)
- Your Highlight on page 4 | location 47-47 | Added on Wednesday, 5 July 2017
08:59:39
was very much involved in local life, and this combination of distance and
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08:59:53
Sometimes I was an observer, while at other moments I was very much involved in
local life, and this combination of distance and intimacy was part of what shaped
my two years in Sichuan.
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09:13:41
dizzying staircases of rice paddies; but the Chinese looked at the people and saw
how
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09:13:43
dizzying staircases of rice paddies; but the Chinese looked at the people and saw
how
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09:13:55
dizzying staircases of rice paddies;

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- Your Highlight on page 15 | location 216-217 | Added on Thursday, 6 July 2017
11:12:18
the way a magician’s cards move according to the silent harmony of routine and
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11:12:23
the way a magician’s cards move according to the silent harmony of routine and
skill.
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11:17:43
where a great deal of work could be put into turning the abstract into reality.
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11:23:33
also a soothing sound; there was something satisfying about hearing their voices
rise and fall in unison as they recited lessons that all of them had learned.
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11:23:53
None of these noises bothered me. The early sounds woke me but that was fine,
because they were part of the routine of the college and hearing them made me feel
as if I were also in step.
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19:54:59
My Chinese wasn’t yet good enough to talk with the people in town, which made the
city overwhelming—a mess of miscommunication.
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19:55:12
My Chinese wasn’t yet good enough to talk with the people in town, which made the
city overwhelming—a mess of miscommunication.
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Astrophysics for People in a Hurry - Neil DeGrasse Tyson
- Your Highlight on page 9-9 | Added on Thursday, 13 July 2017 09:59:27
Though still unknown how it came into existence, this sub-pinpoint-size cosmos
could only expand. Rapidly. In what today we call the big bang
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set physicists off on a race to blend the theory of the small with the theory of
the large into a single coherent theory of quantum gravity
==========
==========
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transmogrifications are entirely prescribed by Einstein’s most famous equation: E =

mc 2 , which is a two-way recipe for how much matter your energy is worth, and how
much energy your matter is worth
==========
Einstein’s most famous equation: E = mc 2 , which is a two-way recipe for how much
matter your energy is worth, and how much energy your matter is worth
==========
11:12:01
was easy to laugh at their ridiculous names, or smile at their childlike shyness,
and it was easy to dismiss them as simple young people from the simplicity of the
countryside.
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- Your Highlight on page 26 | location 391-392 | Added on Friday, 14 July 2017
14:03:23
was easy to laugh at their ridiculous names, or smile at their childlike shyness,
and it was easy to dismiss them as simple young people from the simplicity of the
countryside. But of course nothing was farther from the truth—the Sichuan
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14:09:07
Education was a game and students played it, but in Fuling they hadn’t yet reached
that point.
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15:09:23
English referred to such laborers as “coolies”—from the Chinese kuli, or “bitter

strength.”
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15:12:36
The city is all steps and legs.

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16:21:37
erhu, played well, makes haunting music.

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16:24:46
last the man stops. Gently he lays down the erhu and takes out his pipe. With his
fingers he feels the rough roll of tobacco, and then he calls for his daughter. She
lights the pipe, carefully. The blind man inhales deeply and sits back to rest,
surrounded by the rising roar of the morning city.
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17:24:07
liked watching the routines of the city in the same way that I liked listening to
the routines of the college.
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17:29:32
Others answered that he was a Counter-Revolutionary, the sort of person who would
stir up trouble and disturb the economy.
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17:43:10
This was the strangest part of it all, the way students could study and believe in
Communist courses while free-market contradictions sprang up all around the
college.
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17:44:05
They did whatever was necessary to prove the theories correct, ignoring
complications and contradictions, and in the process they carefully used the
appropriate
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17:44:11
They did whatever was necessary to prove the theories correct, ignoring
complications and contradictions, and in the process they carefully used the
appropriate terms.
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17:44:28
a case in which words and meaning had parted company.

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17:47:14
Another reason may be that some people just want to find and do something “new” and
“curious,” as the Americans are known as adventurous. So they practised
homosexuality as a kind of new excitement. Through this, we can see clearly the
spiritual hollowness of these people and the distortion of the social order.
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17:49:20
Teaching as a foreigner was a matter of trying to negotiate your way through this
political landscape.
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17:52:19
Chinese classics by heart—the verses of Du Fu, of Li Bai, of Qu Yuan—and

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17:52:30

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17:52:34
Yuan—and these were young men and women from the countryside
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17:52:44

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17:54:10
“Four centuries ago, Shakespeare loved a woman and wrote a poem about her. He said
he would make her beauty live forever—that was his promise. Today the year is 1996,
and we are in China, in Sichuan, next to the Yangtze River. Shakespeare never came
to Fuling. None of you has ever been to England, and you have not seen the woman
that Shakespeare loved four hundred years ago. But right now every one of you is
thinking about her.” There was absolute silence.
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18:13:05
She looks like a floating poem.

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18:15:23
Midsummer Night’s Dream are the most powerful figures in the play, because all
power comes from the Proletariat, which is how Revolution starts.
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19:37:12
the daughter of Sichuanese peasants can read Beowulf and make connections to her
own life, and a classroom of Chinese students can listen to a Shakespeare sonnet
and see the flawless features of a Tang Dynasty beauty.
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19:37:46
the daughter of Sichuanese peasants can read Beowulf and make connections to her
own life, and a classroom of Chinese students can listen to a Shakespeare sonnet
and see the flawless features of a Tang Dynasty beauty.
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19:43:19
Regardless, it was a strange experience to watch them perform; they were half-
recognizable, like the play itself, and both the students and Hamlet became
something new in my eyes.
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19:48:16
Lao Da—Big Brother,

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19:50:24
Miao Ze in the Chinese classic The Romance of the Three Kingdoms,

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19:53:49
resounded with sweet regularity as we recited them aloud—iambic

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19:53:52
resounded with sweet regularity as we recited them aloud—iambic

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Dreaming in Chinese (Deborah Fallows)
20:05:58
Bú yào (don’t want), bú yòng (don’t need), méi yǒu (don’t have) bú shì (is not) bù
kěyǐ (cannot)—all these are standard forms of declining offers or requests or
saying no.
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20:11:28
The Chinese way of being polite to each other with words is to shorten the social
distance between you.
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20:11:43
saying please serves to insert a kind of buffer or space that says, in effect, that
we need some formality between us here.
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20:12:39
saying please serves to insert a kind of buffer or space that says, in effect, that
we need some formality between us here.
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20:13:50
When you add the particle “a” at the end of an expression, you actually lessen the
punch and soften your delivery. The walkie-talkie dispatchers are being nicer to
each other by adding all those aaahhs to their speech, serving much the same
purpose as the qualifiers “could,” “would” and “might” in English. The “Will you
see what’s going on aaahh?” is understood as the more polite “Could you see what’s
going on?” I stumbled upon an even more delightful discovery in the so-called dirt
market on Beijing’s south side. Foreigners and tourists throng to the weekend
market, but the locals do, too. A Chinese woman visiting from Guangzhou, the former
Canton, who went with me one day, said she really has no idea why the Chinese love
this market. So, we headed for the aisles most crowded with Chinese people to see
what they liked to buy. The aisles with Chinese shoppers were crammed with jade of
all sorts—bracelets, amulets and beads. There were piles of petrified-looking
walnuts, rubbed to a gleaming, lacquered shine. Men squatted down to examine the
patterns of the shells and tried rolling them around in their hands like giant
worry beads. There were strange horns of animals, polished gems of agate or lapis
and simple river stones in varying
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20:14:03
When you add the particle “a” at the end of an expression, you actually lessen the
punch and soften your delivery.
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20:26:17
discovered that if I say kàn kàn or kàn yi kàn to shop girls, “I’m just looking;
I’ll just have a look; I’m looking around,” they back off instantly, and let me
look in peace.
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20:27:03
Shì shì ma (try try + question): “Can I just try it on?” I say this when I want to
try on the goods, but make no commitments. Zǒu zǒu (walk walk): “I’m out for a
little walk.” I say this to aggressive pedicab drivers looking for a fare. Wánr
wánr (play play): “We’re just having a little fun and relaxation!” I say this when
I’m telling people we’re just going out for no particular reason.
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- Your Highlight on page 60 | location 914-915 | Added on Saturday, 15 July 2017
20:17:35
the Wu is nothing but sound: horns and motors and construction projects echoing up
through the heavy white
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20:17:40
when the view is blocked by clouds, and the city across the Wu is nothing but
sound: horns and motors and construction projects echoing up through the heavy
white fog.
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20:34:14
Hong Xiuquan believed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ.

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20:35:26
The state is shattered; Mountains and rivers remain.

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20:39:00
even as late as the early 1800s it had been illegal for a Chinese to teach the
language to foreigners, and a number of Chinese were imprisoned and even executed
for tutoring young Englishmen.
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20:42:21
Often I’d gaze across the Wu River at the maze of streets and stairways, listening
to the distant hum of daily life, and I’d think about the mysteries that were
hidden in the river town.
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20:44:46
They honked at other cars, and they honked at pedestrians. They honked whenever
they passed somebody, or whenever they were being passed themselves. They honked
when nobody was passing but somebody might be considering it, or when the road was
empty and there was nobody to pass but the thought of passing or being passed had
just passed through the driver’s mind. Just like that, an unthinking reflex: the
driver honked.
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20:48:14
“Chinese” was whatever it took to communicate with the person you happened to be
talking with, and this changed dramatically depending on background and education
level.
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20:50:13
terms—yangguizi, or “foreign devil” da bizi, “big nose”—although

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20:51:06
Finally, as the fall semester wore on, we did everything possible to avoid going to
town. When I did go, I wore headphones. That was the only way I could handle it; I
listened to the loudest and most offensive rap music I had—Dr. Dre, Snoop Doggy
Dogg, the Beastie Boys—and it was just enough to drown out the shouts as I walked
down the street. It made for surreal trips downtown, listening to Snoop rap
obscenities while I dodged the crowds, but it kept me sane.
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20:52:49
By Chinese standards he was slightly fat, which meant that by American standards he
was slightly thin.
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21:04:37
turned to Teacher Liao and my eyes said (or at least I imagined them saying): How
do you like me now? But Teacher Liao’s eyes were glazed with boredom and she said,
“Read the next one.”
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21:05:02
It was the Chinese way. Success was expected and failure criticized and promptly
corrected. You were right or you were budui; there was no middle ground.
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21:05:43
grew to hate budui: its sound mocked me. There was a harshness to it; the bu was a
rising tone and the dui dropped abruptly, building like my confidence and then
collapsing all at once.
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21:08:44
There was a touch of voyeurism in my attention, at least in the sense that I

watched the people work with all of the voyeur’s impotent envy.
==========
21:19:44
We drank tea while we studied—jasmine flower tea, the tiny dried petals unfolding
like blooming lilies on the surface of the hot water. Before he drank, Teacher Kong
blew softly over the cup, so the loose leaves and flowers floated to the far side,
and this was something else I learned in those classes. If he sipped a leaf by
mistake, he turned and spat lightly on the floor. I learned that, too—I liked
living in a cadre’s apartment and still being able to spit on the floor.
==========
21:18:20
Student attendance at the event was mandatory, because the criminals were young
drug dealers and their deaths would provide a valuable lesson for the spectators.
==========
21:18:33
Student attendance at the event was mandatory, because the criminals were young
drug dealers and their deaths would provide a valuable lesson for the spectators.
==========
21:20:38
The most frequently performed procedure in Sichuanese emergency rooms was stomach-
pumping. The vast majority of these patients were male, because drinking, like
smoking, was an important part of being a man. This was true in many parts of
China, especially in the more remote regions, and Sichuan drinking wasn’t simply a
casual way to relax. Often it was competitive, and usually it involved baijiu, a
powerful and foul-tasting grain alcohol.
==========
21:22:02
You could ask any teacher where his alcohol tolerance stood in relation to
everybody else’s in the department,
==========
21:22:25
everybody else’s in the department,
==========
21:22:34
everybody else’s in the department, and he would answer with well-tested precision.
==========
21:31:46
A good banquet was like a good short story: there was always a point, but you
didn’t quite understand it until the very end.
==========
Hegemony or Survival (Noam Chomsky)
- Your Highlight on page 3 | location 45-46 | Added on Monday, 14 August 2017
22:38:28
that humans were a kind of “biological error,” using their allotted 100,000 years
to destroy themselves and, in the process, much else.
==========
22:41:19
It soon drove American public opinion off the global spectrum and helped the
administration achieve electoral aims and establish Iraq as a proper test case for
the newly announced doctrine of resort to force at will. President
==========
22:41:23
the
==========
22:41:27
the newly announced doctrine of resort to force at will.
==========
22:45:06
The unfolding events should be deeply disturbing to those who have concerns about
the world they are leaving to their grandchildren.
==========
22:48:01
In violent states these are not concealed. In more democratic societies barriers
are more subtle.
==========
22:49:11
“giddy multitude of beasts in men’s shapes” rejected the basic framework of the
civil conflict raging in England between king and Parliament, and called for
government “by countrymen like ourselves, that know our wants,” not by “knights and
gentlemen that make us laws, that are chosen for fear and do but oppress us, and do
not know the people’s sores.”
==========
22:53:52
These “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” are to be “spectators,” not

“participants.”
==========
23:11:40
that the role of government is “to protect the minority of the opulent against the
majority.”
==========
23:11:48
“enlightened Statesman” and “benevolent philosopher”

==========
23:13:01
severe problems would arise with the likely increase of those who “will labor under
all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its
benefits.”
==========
23:21:22
Bernays called “the engineering of consent, . . . the very essence of the

democratic process.”
==========
23:35:19
Julio Godoy wrote that “one is tempted to believe that some people in the White
House worship Aztec gods—with the offering of Central American blood.”
==========
- Your Highlight on page 12-12 | Added on Tuesday, 15 August 2017 21:56:24
back on Earth) the European particle physics collaboration † uses a large

accelerator to collide beams of hadrons in an attempt to re-create these very
conditions. This largest machine in the world is sensibly called the Large Hadron
Collider. The slight matter–antimatter asymmetry afflicting the quark–lepton soup
now passed to the hadrons, but with extraordinary consequences. As the universe
continued to cool, the amount of energy available for the spontaneous creation of
basic particles dropped. During the hadron era, ambient photons could no longer
invoke E = mc 2 to manufacture quark–antiquark pairs. Not only that, the photons
that emerged from all the remaining
==========
- Your Highlight on page 15-15 | Added on Tuesday, 15 August 2017 22:11:34
These philosophically fun ideas usually satisfy nobody

==========
- Your Highlight on page 16-16 | Added on Wednesday, 16 August 2017 23:08:40
When Newton breached this philosophical barrier by rendering all motion

comprehensible and predictable, some theologians criticized him for leaving nothing
for the Creator to do.
==========
When Newton breached this philosophical barrier by rendering all motion

comprehensible and predictable, some theologians criticized him for leaving nothing
for the Creator to do.
==========
to be discovered someplace other than Earth

==========
Thus, helium became the first and only element in the chemist’s Periodic Table to
be discovered someplace other than Earth. Okay, the
==========
from the Greek word helios (“the Sun”), and was only later discovered in the lab.
be discovered
==========
be discovered someplace other than Earth
==========
Your best hope is to find a way to communicate using the language of science
==========
- Your Highlight on page 16 | location 231-234 | Added on Wednesday, 16 August 2017
23:25:30
When the military forces occupying Iraq failed to discover the weapons of mass
destruction that allegedly justified the invasion, the administration’s stance
shifted from “absolute certainty” that Iraq possessed WMD on a scale that required
immediate military action to the assertion that American accusations had been
“justified by the discovery of equipment that potentially could be used to produce
weapons.”
==========
23:25:59
“refinement in the controversial concept of a ‘preventive war’”

==========
On Nature and Language - Noam Chomsky
the theoretical linguist at the beginning of the twentieth century does not have at
his disposal a precise device to express the astonishing variety of “regular
patterns” that natural language syntax allows.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 20-20 | Added on Monday, 21 August 2017 08:00:59
And if you insert low mass and low speeds into Einstein’s equations they literally
(or, rather, mathematically) become Newton’s equations—all good reasons to develop
confidence in our understanding of all we claim to understand
==========
Today, the universe has expanded by a factor of 1,000 from the time photons were
set free, and so the cosmic background has, in turn, cooled by a factor of 1,000
==========
it emits light in all parts of the spectrum, but will always peak somewhere. For
household lamps that still use glowing metal filaments, the bulbs all peak in the
infrared, which
==========
it emits light in all parts of the spectrum, but will always peak somewhere. For
household lamps that still use glowing metal filaments, the bulbs all peak in the
infrared, which
==========
For household lamps that still use glowing metal filaments, the bulbs all peak in
the infrared, which is the single greatest contributor to their inefficiency as a
source of visible light. Our senses detect infrared only in the form of warmth on
our skin. The
==========
: 1) Einstein’s 1916 general theory of relativity; 2) Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discovery

that the universe is expanding; and 3) atomic physics developed in laboratories
before and during the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bombs of World War
II.
==========
couldn’t have seen where the galaxy clusters and voids were starting to form.
Before anybody could have seen anything worth seeing, photons had to travel,
unimpeded, across the universe, as carriers of this information
==========
figure out how galaxies and clusters and superclusters arose, we use our best
probe, the CMB—a potent time capsule that empowers astrophysicists to reconstruct
cosmic history in reverse
==========
twoedged sword: it enables cosmology to thrive on the kind of foundation that so

much of the rest of science enjoys, but it also constrains theories that people
thought up when there wasn’t enough data to say whether they were right or wrong
==========
twoedged sword: it enables cosmology to thrive on the kind of foundation that so

much of the rest of science enjoys, but it also constrains theories that people
thought up when there wasn’t enough data to say whether they were right or wrong
==========
Now, each new observation, each morsel of data, wields a twoedged sword: it enables
cosmology to thrive on the kind of foundation that so much of the rest of science
enjoys, but it also constrains theories that people thought up when there wasn’t
enough data to say whether they were right or wrong.
==========
Our own spiral-shaped galaxy, the Milky Way, is named for its spilled-milk
appearance to the unaided eye across Earth’s nighttime sky
==========
They are dim, and so are missed in many surveys of galaxies that cut off below a
prespecified brightness level.
==========
Supernovas are stars that have blown themselves to smithereens and, in the process,
have temporarily (over several weeks) increased their luminosity a billion-fold,
making them visible across the universe
==========
The gas is so hot that it glows strongly in the X-ray part of the spectrum
==========
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (Frans de Waal)
- Your Highlight on page 2 | location 19-20 | Added on Thursday, 24 August 2017
11:07:15
The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is,
certainly is one of degree and not of kind.
==========
11:08:59
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries,
is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.’”
==========
11:28:04
A bat without hearing is like a human without sight.

==========
11:28:45
echolocation.
==========
11:30:33
When insects evolved hearing in order to evade bat detection, some bats responded
with “stealth” vocalizations below the hearing level of their prey.
==========
11:39:10
we fail to find a capacity in a given species, our first thought ought to be “Did
we overlook something?”
==========
11:39:13
we fail to find a capacity in a given species, our first thought ought to be “Did
we overlook something?”
==========
11:39:21
If we fail to find a capacity in a given species, our first thought ought to be

“Did we overlook something?” And the second should be “Did our test fit the
species?”
==========
11:42:14
“what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of
questioning.”
==========
11:53:08
Köpfchengeben (German for “head giving”) that all felines—from house cats to tigers
—use in greeting and courting.
==========
11:54:45
The reason all cats responded in the same way derived from natural feline
communication rather than operant conditioning.
==========
12:01:29
Adult fish sometimes lock their protruding mouths together to settle disputes.
==========
12:07:09
No wonder many ethologists nowadays call themselves behavioral biologists.

==========
12:09:22
the only reason to study animals is to learn about ourselves.

==========
- Your Note on page 28 | location 420 | Added on Thursday, 24 August 2017 12:11:43
1:04
==========
12:11:43
role
==========
- Your Highlight on page 28 | location 420-420 | Added on Tuesday, 29 August 2017
11:55:43
role
==========
11:55:45
role
==========
12:01:38
conditioning tends to reinforce what is already there. Instead of being the

omnipotent creator of behavior, it is its humble servant.
==========
12:01:43
Instead of being the omnipotent creator of behavior, it is its humble servant.

==========
12:12:54
He poked fun at the Skinner box, seeing it as a splendid instrument to demonstrate

the effectiveness of food rewards but not to study complex behavior.
==========
12:16:21
Later in life he sought to turn humans into happy, productive, and “maximally
effective” citizens.
==========
12:17:08
Later in life he sought to turn humans into happy, productive, and “maximally
effective” citizens.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 39 | location 586-586 | Added on Friday, 1 September 2017
23:25:51
some fish keep fertilized eggs in their mouth until they hatch.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 114 | location 1734-1736 | Added on Friday, 1 September
2017 23:29:46
Experts warn that mercury, lead, and other poisons from the flooded areas could be
carried into people’s water supplies, and they fear the outbreak of endemic
infections along the soggy new valley: malaria, leptospirosis, Japanese B
encephalitis.
==========
2017 23:34:39
tired of this version of democracy and silenced it. If China’s leaders wanted the
largest dam
==========
2017 23:34:44
If China’s leaders wanted the largest dam in the world, it would be built,
regardless of the risks.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 119 | location 1811-1814 | Added on Saturday, 2 September
2017 20:31:53
This had originally been farmland, and the peasants whose fields had been taken for
the construction project were compensated with discount prices on new apartments,
as well as the choice between a government job and a cash settlement. The ones I
spoke with had been offered six thousand yuan, and all of them had taken the cash—
it was a lot of money in Fuling, a year’s wages at a decent salary. They were also
provided with a living stipend of seventy yuan a month,
==========
- Your Note on page 119 | location 1814 | Added on Saturday, 2 September 2017
20:32:47
it dosent take long to realize thr value of money. does cultural loction evn
matter?
==========
2017 21:59:45
In Fuling I never saw older people abandoned in retirement homes; they almost
always lived with their children, caring for grandchildren and doing what they
could to help out around the family farm, business, or home. There was no question
that their lives had more of a sense of purpose and routine than I had seen among
the elderly at home.
==========
2017 22:15:28
vast majority of the people would not be directly affected by the coming changes,
and so they weren’t concerned.
==========
2017 22:17:56
were days when I stood on my balcony and felt a touch of sadness as I

==========
2017 22:18:00
There were days when I stood on my balcony and felt a touch of sadness as I looked
at the Yangtze, because I knew its days as a rushing river were numbered. But there
were many other days when the smog was so thick that I couldn’t see the river at
all.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 136 | location 2078-2080 | Added on Wednesday, 13
September 2017 10:24:04
As a girl she had washed her handkerchiefs in the river; or perhaps she had washed
the river in her handkerchiefs, because finally the water ran fragrant, sweetened
by the beauty on its banks, which was how it came to be called the Xiangxi—the
Fragrant River.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 141 | location 2157-2158 | Added on Thursday, 14 September
2017 08:31:26
factory. It takes about five days to get to Hunan. That’s Chairman Mao’s home
province, did you know?
==========
Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (Van Norden, Bryan W.;Ivanhoe, Philip J.)
2017 23:18:08
on the idea that by keeping the lessons of the past in one’s mind and the ancestors
in one’s heart, one could find a way through a dangerous and unpredictable world.
==========
2017 23:18:31
the ancestors played as mediators between the human and spiritual world lends
itself to a form of life in which finding and fulfilling one’s designated familial
and social roles—whatever these might be in a particular case—allows one to take
one’s proper place in a harmonious universal scheme that worked for the benefit of
all.
==========
02:13:10
of intuitive mastery of those forms, and one who has attained this state of
consummate mastery— the junzi , “gentleman”—is said to possess the supreme virtue
of ren , “Goodness.” Originally referring to the strong and handsome appearance of
a noble warrior, ren designates for Kongzi the quality of the perfectly realized
person—one who has so completely mastered the Way that it has become a sort of
second nature.4 Such a state of spiritual perfection is referred to as wuwei ,
“effortless action” or “nonaction”: a state of spontaneous harmony between
individual inclinations and the sacred Way of Heaven.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 147 | location 2253-2255 | Added on Sunday, 17 September
2017 08:12:00
The 1958–1961 Great Leap Forward had been about old men moving mountains: peasants
were told to smelt iron in their backyards so that China’s industrial production
could overtake Britain’s, and the result was massive deforestation and the worst
famine in mankind’s recorded history, killing between 30 and 45 million people.
==========
2017 08:12:28
The 1958–1961 Great Leap Forward had been about old men moving mountains: peasants
were told to smelt iron in their backyards so that China’s industrial production
could overtake Britain’s, and the result was massive deforestation and the worst
famine in mankind’s recorded history, killing between 30 and 45 million people.
==========
2017 09:03:40
Chinese call chui niu—“blowing the bull.”

==========
2017 09:05:54
realized that the key was finding places I went to regularly—it was no good just to
wander around downtown Fuling, because that way I attracted too much attention and
the passersby shouted at me. It was better to go to the same places at the same
times every week, and then the people became accustomed to me and it was easier to
have conversations.
==========
2017 09:14:50
xiaodao xiaoxi, which translated as “small alley news,”

==========
2017 09:31:32
In Chinese you can double adjectives for emphasis,

==========
2017 09:31:43
Workers—curious curious, surprised surprised—stared at me as I passed.

==========
2017 09:33:58
The river traffic

==========
2017 14:36:48
Like many young Chinese, whose instinctive rejection of all things traditional has
been more than amply complemented by school lessons, she uses “feudal” the way an
American child would use “backward.”
==========
2017 14:41:57
When people in Fuling say Qing Dynasty, often what they seem to mean is: It’s very
old, but not as old as many other things.
==========
2017 14:43:52
The candles dance in the Yangtze wind.

==========
2017 14:45:49
Ghosts and evil spirits scatter as the fireworks explode. The children clap and
scream; the old people hold their ears and turn away. The young men remain calm—the
fireworks erupt in a deafening roar, but each man holds the exploding string in
hand until the flame leaps nearly to his fingers, and then, nonchalantly, he drops
the strand and lights another. They do not plug their ears. They do not laugh or
grimace. They make no expression at all; outwardly they are completely cool. But
something in their eyes cannot be controlled, flashing with the sheer exhilaration
of standing on the tomb while all the scenes and sounds of the holiday suddenly
converge on this spot: the throbbing explosions, the heavy smell of gunpowder, the
swirling dust and smoke and sunshine, the long streak of the Yangtze far below like
a dragon basking in the sudden roar of the valley. THE PROCESSION CONTINUES UP THE
MOUNTAIN, past green rows of broad beans, past waist-high wheat, past another steep
ridge of short terraces and winding stone paths.
==========
2017 14:46:07
Ghosts and evil spirits scatter as the fireworks explode. The children clap and
scream; the old people hold their ears and turn away. The young men remain calm—the
fireworks erupt in a deafening roar, but each man holds the exploding string in
hand until the flame leaps nearly to his fingers, and then, nonchalantly, he drops
the strand and lights another. They do not plug their ears. They do not laugh or
grimace. They make no expression at all; outwardly they are completely cool. But
something in their
==========
2017 14:50:28
He points at Dai Mei, and for a moment it seems that he will continue the story,
but he falls silent. He is not a great talker, and perhaps the tale has already
been told too many times.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 184 | location 2807-2808 | Added on Monday, 18 September
2017 15:27:20
blacks in America, and the issue of interracial marriage,

==========
- Your Highlight on page 186 | location 2851-2852 | Added on Monday, 18 September
2017 15:35:45
Lu Xun once remarked: “People with good memories are liable to be crushed by the
weight of suffering. Only those with bad memories, the fittest to survive, can live
on.”
==========
2017 08:13:10
There was no way you could ever debate openly about China’s planned-birth policy—
nobody would dare to oppose it—but
==========
2017 08:20:13
knew that this was not a high point of my experience in China, but it was a
pleasant evening and that was worth something.
==========
Carnet de Voyage (Craig Thompson)
- Your Bookmark on page 19 | location 278 | Added on Tuesday, 26 September 2017
02:23:42
==========
02:27:24
==========
02:27:46
==========
Craig Thompson's Blankets 01 (Craig Thompson)
03:37:23
==========
03:42:49
==========
- Your Bookmark on page 8 | location 110 | Added on Thursday, 28 September 2017
14:30:41
==========
- Your Bookmark on page 9 | location 129 | Added on Friday, 29 September 2017
10:32:12
==========
10:38:46
==========
10:40:50
“Both keeping past teachings alive and understanding the present—someone able to do
this is worthy of being a teacher.”
==========
10:41:12
“If you learn without thinking about what you have learned, you will be lost. If
you think without learning, however, you will fall into danger.”
==========
2017 13:41:22
But it also seemed very Chinese that despite its original failure the wall now had
great value. It had become perhaps the most powerful symbol of national pride, and
nobody connected it with negative qualities like isolationism and stubbornness.
==========
2017 13:42:34
America and China—both countries were arrogant enough to twist some of their
greatest failures into sources of pride.
==========
13:43:21
==========
- Your Highlight on page 215 | location 3292-3294 | Added on Wednesday, 4 October
2017 02:27:50
That was the best part of traveling—I wasn’t really accountable for things I did
and said; I could wander off with anybody and talk about anything I wanted. It
wasn’t like living in Fuling, where people kept track of me and there was always
the knowledge that I still had another year left in the river town. There were many
good things about having a home in China, but that was one of the drawbacks.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 235 | location 3590-3591 | Added on Friday, 6 October 2017
03:45:27
It was the perfect symbol of the divide between the government and the governed,
both of them living in the same place but going about their separate routines a
full two hours apart.
==========
15:24:43
But these were mysteries that I didn’t have time to untangle.

==========
15:35:41
They write them in the air, on the palm of their hand, in tea water on a table; and
to watch a Chinese person do this is to realize how unique the written language is,
and how its words are truly shapes—not just sounds, or collections of letters, but
tangible things that are handled and touched.
==========
Shenzhen (Guy Delisie)
- Your Bookmark on page 1 | location 15 | Added on Sunday, 8 October 2017 15:43:27
==========
==========
==========
==========
- Your Bookmark on page 8 | location 113 | Added on Tuesday, 10 October 2017
15:39:20
==========
15:46:13
==========
- Your Highlight on page 28 | location 422-426 | Added on Tuesday, 10 October 2017
15:50:15
Conversely, people pay lots of money to secure a license plate or a phone number
with the digit 8, because eight, bā , rhymes with fā, as in fā cái, which means “to
become wealthy” in Mandarin. The power of 8 drove the opening of the Beijing
Olympics into the rainy season, just so they could begin on the auspicious 08/08/08
at 8:08. (It didn’t rain.)
==========
15:50:18
Conversely, people pay lots of money to secure a license plate or a phone number
with the digit 8, because eight, bā , rhymes with fā, as in fā cái, which means “to
become wealthy” in Mandarin. The power of 8 drove the opening of the Beijing
Olympics into the rainy season, just so they could begin on the auspicious 08/08/08
at 8:08. (It didn’t rain.)
==========
15:50:35
==========
15:52:00
Chéngyǔ, the most classical of the four-character set phrases, are studied in
school.
==========
15:53:13
xiàn xué xiàn mài, literally “now study now sell,” or, colloquially, to “use on the
spot what you have just learned; teaching something that you only just now learned
yourself.”
==========
15:00:46
only about 400 syllables, about a tenth of English, the language is simply flooded
with homonyms—words that sound alike but have different meanings. English has
homonyms, too, like “seal,” meaning the animal, the stamp or the verb meaning “to
close tightly.” But Mandarin has literally countless homonyms, which makes for a
lot of ambiguity.
==========
15:03:34
But mastering tones is hard. The only tone in Mandarin that I can easily recognize
in daily chatter is the high tone, because it is so distinctive. One friend, a
teacher, told me that the high tone is a dead giveaway of a foreigner’s accent; she
said the key to pronouncing the tone right is to hold the high pitch steady, and
not let it slide off at the end. “Think of it musically,” she said, “like the mi of
do-re-mi. Just aim for mi and hold it there.”
==========
15:05:39
Red channels good fortune and happiness, and it is symbolic of China as a nation.
Hóng bāo, red envelopes, are given as gifts at celebrations; brides wear red; red
is east; and red is the color of China’s flag. Chinese
==========
15:05:47
is east; and red is the color of China’s flag. Chinese
==========
15:05:51
is east;
==========
15:05:58
is east; and red is the color of China’s flag. Chinese women look particularly good
wearing red.
==========
- Your Bookmark on page 40 | location 603 | Added on Friday, 13 October 2017
15:08:34
==========
15:08:53
In Sichuanese, the third and fourth tones are reversed from those of Mandarin.
==========
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of
Journalism (Doris Kearns Goodwin)
- Your Highlight at location 102-103 | Added on Friday, 13 October 2017 15:24:02
He had failed to educate the country about his policies and programs.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 248 | location 3791-3791 | Added on Tuesday, 24 October
2017 06:59:55
He said it without any self-consciousness, the same way that all of them described
their backgrounds.
==========
- Your Highlight at location 188-190 | Added on Tuesday, 24 October 2017 08:54:20
“when I say that she has combined to a degree I have never seen in any other woman
the power of being the best of wives and mothers, the wisest manager of the
household, and at the same time the ideal great lady and mistress of the White
House.” Their boisterous family
==========
“I do not think my eyes are blinded by affection,” the president told a friend,
“when I say that she has combined to a degree I have never seen in any other woman
the power of being the best of wives and mothers, the wisest manager of the
household, and at the same time the ideal great lady and mistress of the White
House.”
==========
“It is true that the mustache, once brown, has grown grayer, but the strong face is
not furrowed with deep wrinkles and the crows feet have not changed the expression
which is habitual to the man who is in robust health and has a joy in living.”
==========
developed “an enlarged personality,” with a “mental scope more encompassing.”

==========
“those who cheered cheered the louder when they saw how their cheers delighted
him.”
==========
are the better placed on account of that fact, I am inclined to think that to be
President well compensates one for all the trials and criticisms
==========
I am inclined to think that to be President well compensates one for all the trials
and criticisms he has to bear and undergo.”
==========
proved a loving father for their three children, Robert, Helen, and Charlie, who
were eighteen,
==========
A Renegade History of the United States (Thaddeus Russell)
- Your Highlight on page 6 | location 92-93 | Added on Wednesday, 1 November 2017
02:46:48
Because this book is a renegade history, it spends as much time in the street, the
bedroom, the movie theater, and the saloon as it does listening to speeches.
==========
02:49:09
Unfortunately, because the historians who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s
were so eager to make the masses into heroes, they did not see that it was
precisely the nonheroic and unseemly characteristics of ordinary folks that changed
American culture for the better.
==========
02:50:34
egregious
==========
02:51:31
If they are sympathetic to the people who consumed them, such things are remade
into “resistance” against oppression or “collective alternatives” to capitalist
individualism. God forbid they could be simply and only “fun.”
==========
- Your Highlight on page 12 | location 180-180 | Added on Thursday, 2 November 2017
02:37:49
But the Founding Fathers invented a way to make Americans think fun was bad. We
call it democracy.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 26 | location 391-392 | Added on Sunday, 5 November 2017
15:26:47
My earliest recollection of my mother is of a slender young woman wearing this

dress. In all my other memories she is older and corpulent.
==========
15:39:38
It seemed to me that the change in myself was due to the influence of my

schoolfellows, who somehow misled me or compelled me to be different from what I
thought I was.
==========
15:41:20
I used to tend a little fire in one of these caves, with other children helping me;
a fire that had to burn forever and therefore had to be constantly maintained by
our united efforts, which consisted in gathering the necessary wood. No one but
myself was allowed to tend this fire. Others could light other fires in other
caves, but these fires were profane and did not concern me. My fire alone was
living and had an unmistakable aura of sanctity.
==========
15:42:08
The answer remained totally unclear, and my uncertainty was accompanied by a

feeling of curious and fascinating darkness.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 33 | location 501-502 | Added on Tuesday, 7 November 2017
00:20:59
When I was a child I performed the ritual just as I have seen it done by the
natives of Africa; they act first and do not know what they are doing. Only long
afterward do they reflect on what they have done.
==========
00:27:15
It struck me as definitely unfair that the inferiority feelings which accompanied

my self-importance should thus be exposed to the world when I had taken every care,
out of amour-propre and vanity, to present as irreproachable an appearance as
possible.
==========
00:31:45
perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn’t even know what
numbers really were. They were not flowers, not animals, not fossils; they were
nothing that could be imagined, mere quantities that resulted from counting.
==========
02:37:49
was exempted from drawing classes on grounds of utter incapacity. This in a way was
welcome to me, since it gave me more free time; but on the other hand it was a
fresh defeat, since I had some facility in drawing, although I did not realize that
it depended essentially on the way I was feeling. I could draw only what stirred my
imagination.
==========
02:41:54
I frittered away my time with loafing, collecting, reading, and playing. But I did
not feel any happier for it; I had the obscure feeling that I was fleeing from
myself.
==========
02:54:08
Previously I had existed, too, but everything had merely happened to me. Now I
happened to myself.
==========
06:54:57
knew so little about myself, and the little was so contradictory that I could not
with a good conscience reject any accusations.
==========
06:55:19
would even draw up a list of alibis in case I should be accused of something.

==========
06:55:21
would even draw up a list of alibis in case I should be accused of something.

==========
06:55:25
I would even draw up a list of alibis in case I should be accused of something.

==========
- Your Bookmark on page 26 | location 398 | Added on Tuesday, 7 November 2017
09:15:27
==========
- Your Highlight on page 30 | location 459-459 | Added on Saturday, 11 November
2017 09:00:08
historian Edmund S. Morgan, “was thick with epithets.”

==========
2017 09:06:57
Founding Fathers redefined freedom as self-control and built a political system

around it called democracy.
==========
2017 09:09:05
democracy is the enemy of personal freedom.

==========
- Your Highlight on page 35 | location 523-523 | Added on Monday, 13 November 2017
00:16:41
in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693),

==========
- Your Highlight on page 254 | location 3887-3888 | Added on Tuesday, 14 November
2017 16:03:00
Foreigners always talked about how difficult it was to understand China, and often
this was true, but there were also many ways in which the people’s ideas were
remarkably uniform and predictable.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 257 | location 3933-3935 | Added on Thursday, 16 November
2017 00:15:39
summer—the Chinese could be hard on foreigners, but at the same time they could be
incredibly patient, generous, and curious about where you had come from. I felt I
had spent my first year coping with the hard part of being a waiguoren, and now I
enjoyed all the benefits.
==========
2017 00:24:49
a small village in the country, where there are few people and nothing much
happens, “old age, disease, and death” are experienced more intensely, in greater
detail, and more nakedly than elsewhere.
==========
2017 00:27:11
This weighty tome on dogmatics was nothing but fancy drivel; worse still, it was a
fraud or a specimen of uncommon stupidity whose sole aim was to obscure the truth.
==========
The Soul of the Camera: The Photographer's Place in Picture-Making (David duChemin)
14:08:07
The rest fall short. For the most part, they do not fall short because they are not
in focus or well-exposed; the camera does so much of that technical work better
than I can these days. They fall short for lack of soul. And when the images
succeed in doing what I hoped they would, it is not generally to the camera’s
credit.
==========
14:09:38
believe more and more every day that the camera, working with time and light as its
raw materials, can help us to see life with wider eyes, revel in moments we’d
otherwise forget in the constant tide of incoming moments, and share those moments
with others. The camera on its own is a wonder, but in the hands of the poet, the
storyteller, the seeker of change, or the frustrated artist, it can create
something alive that touches our humanity.
==========
14:09:46
==========
14:09:52
==========
14:09:59
change. I believe more and more every day that the camera, working with time and
light as its raw materials, can help us to see life with wider eyes, revel in
moments we’d otherwise forget in the constant tide of incoming moments, and share
those moments with others. The camera on its own is a wonder, but in the hands of
the poet, the storyteller, the seeker of change, or the frustrated artist, it can
create something alive that touches our humanity.
==========
14:10:04
I believe more and more every day that the camera, working with time and light as
its raw materials, can help us to see life with wider eyes, revel in moments we’d
==========
14:11:14
every single one of the photographs these masters made is a photograph about which
I can honestly say: I could have done that. But I didn’t. I wasn’t there. I didn’t
see it. And if I were there I would have seen it differently, because while our
eyes are probably pretty similar, the brains with which we perceive the world all
work so profoundly differently that, were we side by side in that moment, we’d have
seen it—and photographed it—differently. The truth is: no, no I could not have done
that.
==========
2017 14:24:27
vision. Some see further than others, and some see deeper. But we all have opinions
about this world, and it’s our perspective on the world—the people who inhabit it
and the things we find
==========
2017 14:24:37
I am certain it will come because we all have vision. Some see further than others,
and some see deeper. But we all have opinions about this world, and it’s our
perspective on the world—the people who inhabit it and the things we find
beautiful, interesting, perplexing, or otherwise—that forms our vision. Or part of
our vision. It’s not what we look at, but the way in which we look. It’s not what
we see, but what we perceive, and what we think about what we perceive.
==========
2017 14:26:52
then we risk repeating ourselves until one day we wake to find that our photographs
not only speak to no one else, they fail to light a spark in ourselves.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 21 | location 315-316 | Added on Friday, 17 November 2017
00:16:43
gives me new ways to express myself, even if I am never understood. After all,
understanding is not the only way to experience something.
==========
00:20:25
But they become extraordinary through the sustained effort to better express the
thing we have to say.
==========
00:24:06
But unless all we want to do is say, “Here’s what this looks like,” rather than the
much more subjective and personal, “Here’s how I see it, here’s what it feels
like,” we can do better.
==========
00:24:58
He’s advocating a subjective approach to making art and flirting with the abstract.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 75 | location 1135-1136 | Added on Monday, 20 November
2017 00:28:13
For everywhere in the realm of religious questions I encountered only locked doors,
and if ever one door should chance to open I was disappointed by what lay behind
==========
2017 00:28:26
I felt completely alone with my certainties.

==========
2017 00:37:20
the more I read and the more familiar I became with city life, the stronger grew my
impression that what I was now getting to know as reality belonged to an order of
things different from the view of the world I had grown up with in the country,
among rivers and woods, among men and animals in a small village bathed in
sunlight, with the winds and the clouds moving over it, and encompassed by dark
night in which uncertain things happened.
==========
2017 00:38:51
We experience joy and sorrow, love and hate, hunger and thirst, fear and trust in
common—all the essential features of existence with the exception of speech,
sharpened consciousness, and science.
==========
2017 13:23:16
He seemed to me like a man who was caged in the edifice of his own words and was
pompously gesticulating in his prison.
==========
2017 14:08:27
I was shamefully, gloriously, triumphantly drunk. It was as if I were drowned in a

sea of blissful
==========
- Your Highlight on page 90 | location 1371-1372 | Added on Tuesday, 21 November
2017 00:44:51
With a tremendous puffing, the wonderful locomotive shook and rattled me up to the
dizzy heights where ever-new abysses and panoramas opened out before my gaze, until
at last I stood on the peak in the strange thin air, looking into unimaginable
distances.
==========
2017 00:17:23
Outwardly this encounter was completely meaningless. But, seen from within, it was
so weighty that it not only occupied my thoughts for days but has remained forever
in my memory, like a shrine by the wayside.
==========
2017 04:47:21
My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest.

==========
2017 04:49:35
The past is terribly real and present, and it catches everyone who cannot save his
skin with a satisfactory answer.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 104 | location 1589-1591 | Added on Friday, 24 November
2017 00:44:00
Children react much less to what grown-ups say than to the imponderables in the
surrounding atmosphere. The child unconsciously adapts himself to them, and this
produces in him correlations of a compensatory nature.
==========
2017 00:45:45
Although we human beings have our own personal life, we are yet in large measure
the representatives, the victims and promoters of a collective spirit whose years
are counted in centuries.
==========
2017 00:46:11
We can well think all our lives long that we are following our own noses, and may
never discover that we are, for the most part, supernumeraries on the stage of the
world theater.
==========
2017 05:45:18
marriage was not all he had imagined it to be. He did a great deal
==========
2017 05:45:28
He did a great deal of good—far too much—and as a result was usually irritable.
==========
2017 06:42:50
learned in fact that something of the sort was amiss, for all my questions were met
with the same old lifeless theological answers, or with a resigned shrug which
aroused the spirit of contradiction in me.
==========
2017 04:58:46
imagination enough to picture the demonstrated procedures

==========
2017 04:58:53
My compassion for animals did not derive from the Buddhistic trimmings of
Schopenhauer’s philosophy, but rested on the deeper foundation of a primitive
attitude of mind—on an unconscious identity with animals.
==========
2017 05:04:48
That was the reason for the bombastic language, the piling up of metaphors, the
hymnlike raptures—all a vain attempt to catch the ear of a world which had sold its
soul for a mass of disconnected facts.
==========
2017 04:57:59
My old wound, the feeling of being an outsider and of alienating others, began to
ache again. But now I understood why. No one, not even I myself, had ever imagined
I could become interested in this obscure bypath.
==========
2017 04:58:42
It was as though two rivers had united and in one grand torrent were bearing me
inexorably toward distant goals.
==========
2017 05:00:19
He had an air of superiority, and yet underneath it he seemed embarrassed and never
quite fitted into any situation.
==========
2017 05:00:46
The only definite thing about him was the impression he gave of almost monomaniacal
ambition which precluded interest in anything but sheer facts. A few years
afterward he became schizophrenic. I mention this as a characteristic example of
the parallelism of events. My first book was on the psychology of dementia praecox
(schizophrenia), and in it my personality with its bias or “personal equation”
responded to this “disease of the personality.” I maintained that psychiatry, in
the broadest sense, is a dialogue between the sick psyche and the psyche of the
doctor, which is presumed to be “normal.” It is a coming to terms between the sick
personality and that of the therapist, both in principle equally subjective. My aim
was to show that delusions and hallucinations were not just specific symptoms of
mental disease but also had a human meaning. The evening after my last examination
I treated myself—for the first time in my life—to the longed-for luxury of going to
the theater.
==========
2017 05:00:55
kind of stupidity? I could never make him out. The only definite
==========
2017 05:00:59
kind of stupidity? I could never make him out. The only

==========
2017 05:01:05
The only definite thing about him was the impression he gave of almost monomaniacal
ambition which precluded interest in anything but sheer facts.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 129 | location 1975-1976 | Added on Monday, 11 December
2017 00:16:58
That was something which I did not understand then, nor had any of my colleagues
concerned themselves with such problems.
==========
2017 00:47:01
The drinking was a desperate attempt to narcotize himself, to forget his oppressive
situation. Naturally, it did not help.
==========
2017 00:50:21
In my practice I was constantly impressed by the way the human psyche reacts to a
crime committed unconsciously.
==========
2017 00:55:42
felt extremely uncomfortable beside my chief and my colleagues, who assumed such
airs of certainty while I was groping perplexedly in the dark.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 141 | location 2159-2160 | Added on Tuesday, 12 December
2017 00:16:12
tried with all my might to understand the content of her abstruse utterances.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 37 | location 560-561 | Added on Tuesday, 12 December 2017
00:20:58
Boycotts against British goods became a favorite tactic among the colonial rebels,
in part because of the austerity they required.
==========
00:21:29
and dissipation.” But thanks to boycotts, “by consuming

==========
00:21:38
“by consuming less of what we are not really in want of, and by industriously
cultivating and improving the natural advantages of our own country, we might save
our substance, even our lands, from becoming the property of others, and we might
effectually preserve our virtue and our liberty, to the latest posterity.”
==========
- Your Highlight on page 42 | location 639-641 | Added on Wednesday, 13 December
2017 14:57:40
Though in such cases “The use of strong drink is at first the effect of free
agency,” it becomes a “necessity” and a “disease of the will.” Because it seizes
and overwhelms its victims, only one remedy was available.
==========
2017 15:12:53
Shopping at our local Wal-Mart in Beijing (which is not like any Wal-Mart you may
have seen elsewhere in the world; it truly caters to the Chinese taste, with
touches like duck carcasses hanging from hooks and tanks full of live turtles and
carp, for dinner), I saw raucous fisticuffs break out among the Chinese shoppers
over the free giveaway shopping bags.
==========
2017 15:14:11
I gave up dreaming about what would be in my American fridge back home: the
cheeses, the olives, the mustards, the crackers. The steps needed to secure those
things in China—the cross-town trips, the burdened traipsing home through crowds,
and the inflated prices—were usually not worth
==========
2017 15:15:11
Out on the small back streets, I might stumble upon a farmer from the countryside
balancing baskets of fresh cherries over his shoulders, or a vendor and his 60-
year-old tricycle cart piled high with heaps of terrific sports socks that looked
like they fell off a Nike factory line in Guangdong.
==========
2017 15:20:24
Getting a Chinese name was more difficult. A Chinese name was critical, our friends
said; it would be our credibility, our bona fides. It would demonstrate that we
weren’t just here to flit around China, but intended to stick it out for a while.
It would make it easier for those we met in China to think of us “real” people.
Plus, the Chinese love names, although not necessarily
==========
2017 15:20:29
Getting a Chinese name was more difficult. A Chinese name was critical, our friends
said; it would be our credibility, our bona fides. It would demonstrate that we
weren’t just here to flit around China, but intended to stick it out for a while.
It would make it easier for those we met in China to think of us “real” people.
Plus, the Chinese love names, although not necessarily difficult-to-pronounce
foreign names.
==========
2017 15:23:42
Choosing a first name is a serious business. There are so many things to worry
about: How does the name sound along with the other names? Does it have an
auspicious meaning, or does it at least sound like another auspicious word? What
about the three names in a row, the family-middle-first names; do they together
imply anything? How do the characters look, and how do they look together? Can a
six-year-old learn to write them?
==========
2017 15:24:13
It’s no wonder that Chinese parents are given 30 days to name their children
officially.
==========
2017 15:25:37
Fènduī meaning “pile of shit.”

==========
2017 15:26:40
how it can possibly help to identify people by last name only, as newspapers always
do.
==========
2017 15:27:00
To help keep each other straight, the Chinese follow a few customs. Titles are
important: Chén Lǎoshī,
==========
2017 15:27:23
Nicknames help, too. Many of these are hold-overs from that first month before the
parents could decide what to actually name their babies.
==========
2017 15:28:03
Most Chinese whom Westerners meet will also have an English name. This makes it
easy on us, and the Chinese seem to like it, too. Hotels usually give English names
to the housekeepers and doormen. Tour guides, upscale shopkeepers and drivers have
them, too. English teachers name their students, with varying results. Some are
classic names like Catherine, Anna, Edward, Peter. Some are cute names, Kitty,
Jacky, Sunny, Candy. Some are more interesting like Isaac, Kaiser, Hermes, Elvis,
Felix. There are a few signs of
==========
2017 15:28:07
Most Chinese whom Westerners meet will also have an English name. This makes it
easy on us, and the Chinese seem to like it, too. Hotels usually give English names
to the housekeepers and doormen. Tour guides, upscale shopkeepers and drivers have
them, too. English teachers name their students, with varying results. Some are
classic names like Catherine, Anna, Edward, Peter. Some are cute names, Kitty,
Jacky, Sunny, Candy. Some are more interesting like Isaac, Kaiser, Hermes, Elvis,
Felix. There are a few signs of English-teacher revenge: Winkie and Cutie.
==========
Political Order and Political Decay (Francis Fukuyama)
04:04:23
A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill
executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.
==========
04:06:28
But at the moment, its most fundamental problem is that it lacks a state—that is, a
central authority that can exercise a monopoly of legitimate force over its
territory to keep the peace and enforce the law.
==========
04:07:12
The reason that this part of the world is so much poorer in terms of income,
health, education, and the like than booming regions like East Asia can be traced
directly to its lack of strong government institutions.
==========
04:07:33
But that state is not working well, and its problems may be related to the fact
that it is too institutionalized.
==========
06:55:00
But the private sector was a happy participant feeding the mortgage frenzy and
could take undue risks because large banks knew that they would ultimately get
bailed out by the government if they got into trouble.
==========
06:58:12
The second reason for the failure is that the banks are very rich and powerful, and
can hire a legion of high-priced lobbyists to work on their behalf. Despite
enormous public anger against the banking sector and the taxpayer bailouts, these
lobbyists have succeeded in blocking meaningful regulation that would have gone
directly to the heart of the too-big-to-fail problem.
==========
07:12:15
a new middle class had emerged in both countries, whose expectations were much
higher than those of their parents’ generation.
==========
07:12:41
Government actually had to deliver better results if it was to be regarded as

legitimate,
==========
07:12:50
Government actually had to deliver better results if it was to be regarded as

legitimate, and needed to be more flexible and responsive to changing public
demands.
==========
07:14:01
While they have been the beneficiaries of the country’s breakneck economic growth
over the past generation, they, like their counterparts elsewhere, have different
and higher expectations of government.
==========
07:17:08
Government institutions that are supposed to serve public purposes have been
captured by powerful private interests, such that democratic majorities have a
difficult time asserting their control.
==========
07:19:59
in the case of emerging market countries like Turkey and Brazil, the problem is one
of social change outstripping existing institutions.
==========
07:21:28
Existing institutions often fail to accommodate these new actors and, as a result,
come under pressure to change.
==========
07:22:46
Huntington’s work was critical in making people understand that political

development was a separate process from economic and social growth, and that before
a polity could be democratic, it had to provide basic order.
==========
07:24:11
they practice nepotism and favor genetic relatives.

==========
07:25:55
Natural sociability can be overridden by the development of new institutions that

provide incentives for other types
==========
07:26:05

provide incentives for other types
==========
07:26:19
universal to all cultures and historical periods. Natural sociability can be

overridden by the development
==========
07:26:30

provide incentives for other types of behavior (for example, favoring a qualified
stranger over a genetic relative), but it constitutes a form of social relationship
to which humans always revert when such alternative institutions break down.
==========
07:27:29
Human beings by nature are also norm-creating and norm-following creatures. They
create rules for themselves that regulate social interactions and make possible the
collective action of groups.
==========
07:27:41
Since an institution is nothing more than a rule that persists over time, human
beings therefore have a natural tendency to institutionalize their behavior.
==========
07:30:06
We typically call these tribes; anthropologists sometimes use the term “segmentary
lineages” to describe individuals who trace ancestry to a common progenitor who
might be several generations removed.
==========
07:36:51
state, in contrast to a band or tribe, possesses a monopoly on legitimate coercion

and exercises that power over a defined territory. Because they are centralized and
hierarchical, states tend to produce higher degrees of social inequality than
earlier kinship-based forms of organization.
==========
07:38:30
modern state, on the other hand, is impersonal: a citizen’s relationship to the

ruler does not depend on personal ties but simply on one’s status as citizen. State
administration does not consist of the ruler’s family and friends; rather,
recruitment to administrative positions is based on impersonal criteria such as
merit, education, or technical knowledge.
==========
07:43:28
China was the first world civilization to establish a nonpatrimonial, modern state,
which it did some eighteen centuries before similar political units appeared in
Europe.
==========
07:45:58
“War made the state and the state made war.”

==========
07:49:29
Kinship was ultimately replaced by a more modern form of social relationship based
on legal contract, known as feudalism.
==========
07:51:47
Religious institutions in many cultures were essentially legal bodies responsible

for interpreting a set of sacred texts and giving them moral sanction over the rest
of society.
==========
07:55:58
emerge. China never developed a transcendental religion; perhaps for this reason,
it never developed a true rule of law. There, the state emerged first, and up to
the present day law has never existed as a fundamental constraint on political
power.
==========
07:56:35
The sequence was reversed in Europe: law preceded the rise of the modern state.
When European monarchs aspired to behave like Chinese emperors from the late
sixteenth century on and create modern, centralized absolutist states, they had to
do so against the backdrop of an existing legal order that limited their powers.
==========
07:58:28
democratic accountability.
==========
07:59:08
These institutions represented the elites in society—the upper nobility, gentry,

and in some cases the bourgeoisie in independent cities.
==========
08:06:06
Locke argued that rights were natural and inhered in human beings qua human beings;
governments existed only to protect these rights and could be overturned if they
violated them. These principles—no taxation without representation and consent of
the governed—would become the rallying cry of the American colonists when they
revolted against British authority less than a century later in 1776.
==========
11:26:16
The first was the Industrial Revolution, in which per-person output moved to a much
higher sustained level than in any previous period of human history. This had
enormous consequences because economic growth began to change the underlying nature
of societies.
==========
11:28:31
Modern, more highly developed states, by contrast, make a distinction between the
private interest of the rulers and the public interest of the whole community. They
strive to treat citizens on a more impersonal basis, applying laws, recruiting
officials, and undertaking policies without favoritism.
==========
11:32:36
These three categories of institutions may exist in different polities

independently of one another, and in various combinations.
==========
11:34:13
A state that is powerful without serious checks is a dictatorship; one that is weak
and checked by a multitude of subordinate political forces is ineffective and often
unstable.
==========
11:34:57
part of the problem is that we don’t understand how Denmark itself came to be
Denmark and therefore don’t comprehend the complexity and difficulty of political
development.
==========
11:37:06
An important one historically was military

==========
11:37:15
military competition,
==========
2017 09:24:29
economic conflicts, and regulating social behavior. But as recurring

==========
2017 09:24:38
But as recurring patterns of behavior, they can also grow rigid and fail to adapt
when the circumstances that brought them into being in the first place themselves
change.
==========
2017 09:25:08
Anyone who suggests abolishing the British Monarchy, or the American Constitution,
or the Japanese emperor and replacing it with something newer and better, faces a
huge uphill struggle.
==========
2017 09:25:42
While modern political orders seek to promote impersonal rule, elites in most
societies tend to fall back on networks of family and friends, both as an
instrument for protecting their positions and as the beneficiaries of their
efforts. When they succeed, elites are said to “capture” the state, which reduces
the latter’s legitimacy and makes it less accountable to the population as a whole.
==========
2017 09:28:33
No modern society is likely ever to fully revert to a tribal one, but we see
examples of “tribalism” all around us, from street gangs to the patronage cliques
and influence peddling at the highest levels of modern politics.
==========
2017 09:30:04
This kind of political decay leads either to slowly increasing levels of

corruption, with correspondingly lower levels of government effectiveness, or to
violent populist reactions to perceived elite manipulation.
==========
2017 09:34:40
weak geopolitical position forced it to compensate by creating an efficient state

administration.
==========
2017 09:36:08
State building after the advent of democracy is possible, but it often requires
mobilization of new social actors and strong political leadership to bring about.
==========
2017 09:37:49
Fortunately, violence is not the only route to national unity; identities can also
be altered to fit the realities of power politics, or established around expansive
ideas like that of democracy itself that minimize exclusion of minorities from the
national community.
==========
2017 09:39:53
In the non-Western world, therefore, it is not possible to speak of institutional

development without reference to foreign or imported institutions.
==========
2017 09:41:47
The most successful non-Western countries today are precisely those that had the
most developed indigenous institutions prior to their contact with the West.
==========
2017 09:42:34
The terrible colonial legacy was thus more an act of omission than of commission.
==========
2017 09:43:49
bequeathed
==========
2017 09:45:10
mercantilist
==========
2017 09:48:53
The spread of democracy depends on the legitimacy of the idea of democracy. For
much of the nineteenth century, many educated and well-meaning people believed that
the “masses” simply did not have the capacity to exercise the franchise
responsibly.
==========
2017 09:50:57
Democracy in the developed world became secure and stable as industrialization

produced middle-class societies, that is, societies in which a significant majority
of the population thought of themselves as middle class.
==========
2017 09:55:21
is clear that the current degree of globalization and interdependence among states
means that national
==========
2017 09:55:25
individual societies, and not on international ones. It is clear

==========
2017 09:55:30
is clear that the current degree of globalization and interdependence among states
means that national states are to a much lesser degree the monopoly providers of
public services (if they ever were).
==========
2017 09:59:12
If there is a single theme that underlies many of the chapters of this book, it is
that there is a political deficit around the world, not of states but of modern
states that are capable, impersonal, well organized, and autonomous.
==========
2017 09:59:44
despotic
==========
2017 10:10:31
Many appear to be strong in what the sociologist Michael Mann labels despotic
power, the ability to suppress journalists, opposition politicians, or rival ethnic
groups. But they are not strong in their ability to exercise what Mann calls
infrastructural power, the ability to legitimately make and enforce rules, or to
deliver necessary public goods like safety, health, and education.10
==========
2017 10:13:51
Ronald Reagan’s assertion that “Government is not the solution to our problem,
government is the problem.”
==========
2017 10:14:14
Singapore and China that have achieved seemingly miraculous economic results in the
absence of democracy.
==========
2017 10:17:18
There is, however, a very powerful correlation between the quality of government
and good economic and social outcomes.
==========
Trust (Francis Fukuyama)
- Your Highlight on page 7 | location 95-96 | Added on Wednesday, 20 December 2017
10:21:52
and a great number have simultaneously moved in the direction of market-oriented

economies and integration into the global capitalist division of labor.
==========
2017 10:24:37
These days, the highest ambition of most governments in their macroeconomic policy
is to do no harm, by ensuring a stable money supply and controlling large budget
deficits.
==========
2017 10:26:07
Japanese business network known as a keiretsu buy from one another rather than from
a foreign company that might offer better price or quality.
==========
2017 10:26:30
Increasingly, Asians point to superior aspects of their own cultural inheritance,

such as deference to authority, emphasis on education, and family values, as
sources of social vitality.
==========
2017 10:27:31
Where Huntington’s argument is less convincing, however, is that cultural

differences will necessarily be the source of conflict.
==========
2017 10:29:28
the social collaboration of human beings. And

==========
2017 10:29:49
And while people work in organizations to satisfy their individual needs, the
workplace also draws people out of their private lives and connects them to a wider
social world.
==========
2017 10:30:15
For just as people are selfish, a side of the human personality craves being part
of larger communities.
==========
2017 10:35:01
the Toyota Motor Company’s Takaoka assembly plant, any of the thousands of assembly
line workers who work there can bring the entire plant to a halt by pulling on a
cord at his or her workstation. They seldom do. By contrast, workers at the great
Ford auto plants like Highland Park or River Rouge—plants that virtually defined
the nature of modern industrial production for three generations—were never trusted
with this kind of power. Today, Ford workers, having adopted Japanese techniques,
are trusted with similar powers, and have greater control over their workplace and
machines.
==========
2017 10:35:31
a blue-collar worker can obtain credentials as an engineer by attending an

extensive in-company training program rather than going to a university.
==========
2017 10:35:47
economic actors supported one another because they believed that they formed a
community based on mutual
==========
2017 10:36:00
economic actors supported one another because they believed that they formed a
community based on mutual trust.
==========
2017 10:37:07
The community in each of these cases was a cultural one, formed not on the basis of
explicit rules and regulations but out of a set of ethical habits and reciprocal
moral obligations internalized by each of the community’s members.
==========
2017 10:41:58
Coleman argued that in addition to skills and knowledge, a distinct portion of

human capital has to do with people’s ability to associate with each other, that is
critical not only to economic life but to virtually every other aspect of social
existence as well.
==========
2017 10:44:11
lawyers, so that its citizens can sue one another. Both of

==========
2017 10:44:22
Both of these costs, which amount to a measurable percentage of gross domestic
product annually, constitute a direct tax imposed by the breakdown of trust in the
society.
==========
2017 10:48:43
Adam Smith well understood, economic life is deeply embedded in social life, and it
cannot be understood apart from the customs, morals, and habits of the society in
which it occurs. In short, it cannot be divorced from culture.1 Consequently, we
have been ill served by contemporary economic debates that fail to take account of
these cultural factors. An example is the argument that has taken place in the
United States between free market economists and the so-called neomercantilists
over the past decade. Proponents of the latter perspective—including people like
Chalmers Johnson, James Fallows, Clyde Prestowitz, John Zysman, Karl van Wolferen,
Alice Amsden, and Laura Tyson—have argued that the dynamic and fastgrowing
economies of East Asia have succeeded not by following but by violating the rules
of neoclassical economics.2 The Asian fast developers have achieved such
astoundingly high growth rates, the neomercantilists argue, not because of the
untrammeled working of free markets but because governments in each case stepped in
to promote development through industrial policies. For all of their awareness of
==========
2017 10:49:00
Adam Smith well understood, economic life is deeply embedded in social life, and it
cannot be understood apart from the customs, morals, and habits of the society in
which it occurs.
==========
2017 10:49:18
Consequently, we have been ill served by contemporary economic debates that fail to
take account of these cultural factors.
==========
2017 10:55:25
sunrise versus sunset industries.

==========
2017 10:55:51
In each case, the state intervened not to prop up employment in these sectors but
to assist in their demise.
==========
2017 10:56:39
While paying lip-service to the need to shift resources into more modern sectors,
the very democratic character of European governments led them to give in to
political pressures to direct government subsidies to older industries, often at
tremendous cost to taxpayers.
==========
2017 10:58:53
In other words, in calculating comparative advantage, economists need to take into

account relative endowments of social capital, as well as more conventional forms
of capital and resources.
==========
2017 10:58:57

of capital and resources. When there is a deficit in social capital,
==========
2017 10:59:26

of capital and resources.
==========
2017 11:00:01
giving free rein to self-interest promotes growth.

==========
- Your Highlight on page 24 | location 361-363 | Added on Thursday, 21 December
2017 04:30:11
human beings seek to acquire the largest possible amount of the things they think
are useful to themselves, they do this in a rational way, and they make these
calculations as individuals seeking to maximize the benefit to themselves before
they seek the benefit of any of the larger groups of which they are part.
==========
2017 04:30:25
neoclassical economics postulates that human beings are essentially rational but
selfish individuals who seek to maximize their material well-being.
==========
2017 04:40:03
It is not rational for people to be “rational” about every single choice they make
in life; if this were true, their lives would be consumed in decisions over the
smallest matters.
==========
2017 10:00:46
It has been widely remarked that the electronic media have contributed to the fall
of tyrannical regimes,
==========
2017 10:01:54
variety of authors have argued that as a result of the telecommunications

revolution, all of us will someday be working in small, networked “virtual”
corporations. That is, firms will ruthlessly downsize until they have stripped out
all activities but their “core competence,” contracting out through glass telephone
lines to other small firms for everything from supplies and raw materials to
accounting and marketing services.
==========
2017 10:05:24
Hierarchies are necessary because not all people within a community can be relied
upon to live by tacit ethical rules alone.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 32 | location 478-478 | Added on Friday, 22 December 2017
06:26:13
Without trust, there will be a strong incentive to bring these activities in-house
and restore the old hierarchies.
==========
06:26:37
spontaneous community will emerge once hierarchy has been undermined.

==========
06:27:19
a low-trust society may never be able to take advantage of the efficiencies that
information technology offers.
==========
06:29:19
trust is not necessary for cooperation: enlightened self-interest, together with

legal mechanisms like contracts, can compensate for an absence of trust and allow
strangers jointly to create an organization that will work for a common purpose.
==========
06:32:41
The most useful kind of social capital is often not the ability to work under the
authority of a traditional community or group, but the capacity to form new
associations and to cooperate within the terms of reference they establish.
==========
06:35:01
Social capital has major consequences for the nature of the industrial economy that
society will be able to create. If people who have to work together in an
enterprise trust one another because they are all operating according to a common
set of ethical norms, doing business costs less. Such a society will be better able
to innovate organizationally, since the high degree of trust will permit
==========
06:35:08
Social capital has major consequences for the nature of the industrial economy that
society will be able to create. If people who have to work together in an
enterprise trust one another because they are all operating according to a common
set of ethical norms, doing business costs less. Such a society will be better able
to innovate organizationally, since the high degree of trust will permit a wide
variety of social relationships to emerge.
==========
06:35:28
By contrast, people who do not trust one another will end up cooperating only under
a system of formal rules and regulations, which have to be negotiated, agreed to,
litigated, and enforced, sometimes by coercive means.
==========
06:45:49
“communitarian capitalism.”
==========
06:47:31
People’s Republic of China itself are examples; the essence of Chinese Confucianism
is the elevation of family bonds above all other social loyalties.
==========
09:10:28
Although the absence of trust in a society may encourage small enterprises and
imposes a tax on economic activity, these deficiencies may be more than compensated
for by advantages that small companies often have over large ones.
==========
09:15:19
Workers usually find their workplaces more satisfying if they are treated like
adults who can be trusted to contribute to their community rather than like small
cogs in a large industrial machine designed by someone else.
==========
09:17:16
There are many arguments among economists and others whether this is an adequate
way of measuring human well-being, since per capita GDP looks only at money and not
health, opportunity, fairness, distribution, and many other aspects of human
flourishing.
==========
09:18:47
Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft,
==========
09:19:46
these schema sought to explicate the shift from Gemeinschaft—the

==========
09:19:56
Gemeinschaft—the close-knit village where everyone knows each other and identities
are fixed—to Gesellschaft, the big city with its diversity and anonymity.
==========
09:27:01
This expansion, in turn, was driven by a host of political and institutional

factors: the establishment of secure property rights, the rise of modern states,
the invention of double-entry bookkeeping and the modern corporation, and new
technologies of communications and transportation.
==========
09:27:20
The Industrial Revolution in turn rested on the systematic application of the

scientific method and its incorporation into an institutional structure of
universities and research organizations, which could then be translated into
technological innovations.
==========
09:30:18
Social mobilization creates political change by creating new groups that demand
participation in the political system.
==========
09:30:29
America in the late nineteenth century, workers began to join together in trade
unions and pushed for higher wages, as well as better and safer working conditions.
==========
09:36:39
He argued that both poor traditional societies and fully modernized societies were
stable; instability was characteristic of modernizing societies in which the
different components of modernization failed to advance in a coordinated fashion.6
In the forty-plus years since Huntington wrote his book, there has been a
tremendous amount of research into conflict and violence in developing countries by
scholars including James Fearon, David Laitin, and Paul Collier.7 In light of this
recent work, Huntington’s theory would have to be revised in many ways.
==========
09:36:58
He argued that both poor traditional societies and fully modernized societies were
stable; instability was characteristic of modernizing societies in which the
different components of modernization failed to advance in a coordinated fashion.6
==========
09:45:27
acceptance of constitutional rules for regulating political conflict.

==========
09:45:51
Political development, in particular, follows its own logic independent of economic

growth.
==========
12:39:24
The human rights community seeks to use law as a mechanism for protecting
vulnerable individuals from abuse by states—not just authoritarian regimes but also
liberal democracies that are sometimes motivated to bend the rules in pursuit of
terrorists or other threats.
==========
12:44:41
It is more often about getting governments to actually do the things expected of

them, like providing citizen security, protecting property rights, making available
education and public health services, and building the infrastructure that is
necessary for private economic activity to occur. Indeed, in very many countries
democracy itself is threatened because the state is too corrupt or too incompetent
to do these things. People begin to wish for a powerful authority—a dictator or
savior—that will cut through the blather of politicians and actually make things
work.
==========
12:48:09
In such cases, however, the extent of necessary government subsidy or regulation is

often debatable, since excessive state intervention can distort market signals or
choke off private activity altogether. In addition to providing public goods
==========
12:48:13
such cases, however, the extent of necessary government subsidy or regulation is

often debatable, since excessive state intervention can distort market signals or
choke off private activity altogether.
==========
12:48:49
Most governments, even ones committed ideologically to free markets, end up doing
things they believe will encourage investment and economic growth beyond the bare
provision of necessary public goods.
==========
12:49:23
Karl Polanyi noted, most premodern social systems revolved around the ability of
the leader or Big Man in a group to redistribute goods to his followers, a practice
that was much more common historically than market exchange.
==========
12:49:52
rapacity
==========
12:51:31
One of the most common is mandatory insurance pools, in which the government forces
the community to contribute to insurance plans which, in the case of social
security, redistribute income from young to old, and in the case of medical
insurance, from the healthy to the sick.
==========
12:52:03
Liberal theorists from John Locke to Friedrich Hayek have always been skeptical of
government-mandated redistribution, since it threatens to reward the lazy and
incompetent at the expense of the virtuous and hardworking.
==========
12:52:38
economists call “moral hazard”: by rewarding people based on their level of income
rather than their individual effort, the government discourages work. This was of
course the case in former Communist countries such as the Soviet Union, where “the
government pretended to pay us and we pretended to work.”
==========
12:58:40
The idea, however, that bureaucrats should be chosen according to their technical
qualifications and promoted on the basis of merit rather than through personal
connections is both widely accepted and correlated with positive governance
outcomes like low corruption and economic
==========
12:58:45
The idea, however, that bureaucrats should be chosen according to their technical
qualifications and promoted on the basis of merit rather than through personal
connections is both widely accepted and correlated with positive governance
outcomes like low corruption and economic growth.
==========
2017 13:00:20
Joel Migdal calls the ability of a state to “penetrate” the society over which it
presides.
==========
2017 13:02:45
Lant Pritchett, Michael Woolcock, and Matt Andrews have argued that one of the big
problems with developing countries’ governments is that they engage in what they
term “isomorphic mimicry,” that is, copying the outward forms of developed
countries’ governments, while being unable to reproduce the kinds of outputs, like
education and health, that the latter achieve.10 Measuring what the government
actually does rather than how it does it would avoid this problem.
==========
2017 14:33:58
“roving bandits” who gained resources largely through pillaging and feuding to
“stationary bandits” who earned their keep by taxing a servile agrarian population
for whom they provided a minimum of public goods like physical security and justice
in return.
==========
2017 13:36:40
Hegel in the 1930s, suggested that the idea of the modern state, once unleashed in
the world, would eventually universalize itself because it was so powerful: those
facing it would either conform to its dictates or be swallowed up.12
==========
2017 13:45:17
The Prussian Code remained a feudal document insofar as it divided citizens into
three classes—noblemen, burghers, and peasants—with different rights.
==========
2017 13:46:12
particularly important reform triggered by Napoleon’s victory was the opening of

ownership of landed estates to all comers, which freed up land for the market
economy.
==========
2017 15:00:51
The opposite of autonomy is subordination, where an organization is effectively

controlled by outside forces.
==========
2017 15:02:50
It is impossible to run a large organization, public or private, without a

bureaucracy, but once authority has been delegated to the administrative hierarchy,
the chief executive loses a great deal of control and often becomes a prisoner of
that very bureaucracy.
==========
2017 15:07:53
hesitated to purge the civil service of entrenched right-wing

==========
2017 02:09:22
Cultural anthropologists insist that there are virtually no aspects of culture that
are common to all human societies.3 Cultural factors are therefore incapable of
being systematized into universal laws; they can be interpreted only through what
Clifford Geertz calls “thick description,” an ethnographic technique that takes
account of the variety and complexity of each individual culture.
==========
2017 02:10:28
Geertz’s own definition of culture is “an historically transmitted pattern of

meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in
symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their
knowledge about and attitudes toward life.”
==========
2017 02:11:50
culture: culture is inherited ethical habit.

==========
2017 02:14:11
philosopher Nietzsche called a people’s “language of good and evil.”
==========
2017 03:07:01
The close relationship between moral virtue and habit is evident in the concept of
character. One can easily know the right thing to do intellectually, but only
people with “character” are able to do them under difficult or challenging
circumstances.
==========
2017 03:07:23
Aristotle explains that in contrast to intellectual virtue, “ethical virtue

[ēthikē] is for the most part the product of habit [ethos], and has indeed derived
its name, with a slight variation of form, from that word.”
==========
2017 03:08:38
Ethical systems create moral communities because their shared languages of good and
evil give their members a common moral life.
==========
2017 03:08:51
Certain ethical codes tend to promote a wider radius of trust than others by
emphasizing the imperatives of honesty, charity, and benevolence toward the
community at large.
==========
2017 03:09:04
This, Weber argued, was one of the key outcomes of the Puritan doctrine of grace,
which encouraged higher standards of trustworthy behavior in realms well beyond the
family.
==========
- Your Note on page 43 | location 659 | Added on Thursday, 28 December 2017
03:09:26
Beyond family
==========
2017 03:11:06
Gathering the necessary information and considering possible alternatives is itself

a costly and time-consuming process, one that can be short-circuited by custom and
habit.
==========
2017 03:12:17
well-being ranks lower than other objectives. A devout
==========
2017 03:12:34
devout Buddhist, for example, believes that the end of life is not the accumulation
of material possessions but precisely the opposite: the annihilation of the desire
for possession and the dissolution of individual personality into a universal
nothingness.
==========
2017 03:17:43
Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which showed that
the early Puritans, seeking to glorify God alone and renouncing the acquisition of
material goods as an end in itself, developed certain virtues like honesty and
thrift that were extremely helpful to the accumulation of capital.
==========
2017 03:20:40
In other words, the greatest utility maximizers may not always be the rational
ones; people practicing certain kinds of traditional moral and social virtues in an
arational way, and who frequently aim at completely noneconomic goals, may not be
as disadvantaged or as confused as modern economists would have us believe.
==========
2017 03:23:02
Much of the debate over poverty in the United States in the past generation has
turned on the question of whether the American urban underclass is poor because it
lacks economic opportunities or whether there is something that could be called a
“culture of poverty”—dysfunctional social habits like teen pregnancy and drug
addiction—that would persist even if the economic opportunities existed.
==========
2017 03:49:34
What may start out as rational choices can become cultural artifacts over time.
==========
2017 03:55:35
In England, by contrast, society became far more self-organizing because people

were not dependent on centralized authority to adjudicate their differences, a
habit that was carried over by the English settlers to the New World.
==========
2017 08:32:33
communism created many habits—excessive dependence on the state, leading to an

absence of entrepreneurial energy, an inability to compromise, and a disinclination
to cooperate voluntarily in groups like companies or political parties—that have
greatly slowed the consolidation of either democracy or a market economy. People in
these societies may have given their intellectual
==========
2017 08:32:43
communism created many habits—excessive dependence on the state, leading to an

absence of entrepreneurial energy, an inability to compromise, and a disinclination
to cooperate voluntarily in groups like companies or political parties—that have
greatly slowed the consolidation of either democracy or a market economy.
==========
2017 08:39:53
There is no doubt that human beings are, as the economists say, fundamentally
selfish and that they pursue their selfish interests in a rational way. But they
also have a moral side in which they feel obligations to others, a side that is
frequently at cross-purposes with their selfish instincts.
==========
2017 08:41:41
Weber stood Karl Marx on his head by arguing that it was not underlying economic
forces that created cultural products like religion and ideology but rather culture
that produced certain forms of economic be-havior.
==========
2017 08:44:46
Protestant conversions in Latin America have been associated with significant

increases in hygiene, savings, educational achievement, and ultimately per capita
==========
2017 08:45:01
Protestant conversions in Latin America have been associated with significant

increases in hygiene, savings, educational achievement, and ultimately per capita
income.
==========
2017 08:46:21
fraction of that of the modern worker, because modern wealth is based on human
capital (knowledge
==========
2017 08:46:25
modern wealth is based on human capital (knowledge and education), technology,

innovation, organization, and a host of other factors related to the quality rather
than the simple quantity of labor used to create it.
==========
2017 08:46:45
Weber’s spirit of capitalism refers, then, not just to the work ethic narrowly
defined but to other related virtues like frugality (the propensity to save), a
rational approach to problem solving, and a preoccupation with the here-and-now
that inclines individuals to master their environment through innovation and labor.
==========
2017 08:49:22
Weber observed that many businessmen would introduce themselves as some kind of
Christian believer, in order to establish credentials for honesty and
trustworthiness.
==========
- Your Note on page 54 | location 824 | Added on Thursday, 28 December 2017
08:50:25
Nepalese people would usually ask for the stragers name and caste
==========
2017 08:54:24
fifteenth
==========
2017 10:33:28
little could be done about this problem, and that some degree of corruption
==========
2017 10:33:38
there was also a widely held view among development practitioners that little could
be done about this problem, and that some degree of corruption was either
inevitable or not so serious as to impede economic growth.
==========
2017 10:34:53
Having a strong and effective state involves more than just controlling corruption,
but highly corrupt governments usually have big problems in delivering services,
enforcing laws, and representing the public interest.
==========
2017 10:35:33
Gaming the political system for private gain is what economists label “rent
seeking.”
==========
2017 10:37:46
Charges of corruption are frequently made not in the interest of improved

government but as political weapons.
==========
2017 10:38:02
In societies where most politicians are corrupt, singling one out for punishment is
often not a sign of reform but of a power grab.
==========
2017 10:40:01
accepted taxonomy for understanding the different behaviors that are typically
lumped under the heading of corruption does not exist.
==========
2017 10:40:06
Yet despite the scholarly work on this subject, a commonly accepted taxonomy for
understanding the different behaviors that are typically lumped under the heading
of corruption does not exist.3
==========
2017 10:51:08
Chinese Confucianism had developed a parallel doctrine many centuries earlier:

emperors were not simply owners of the lands and people they ruled but rather moral
guardians of the whole community, who had duties to communal well-being.
==========
2017 10:54:18
Governments have any number of ways of creating artificial scarcities, and thus the
most basic forms of corruption involve abuse of this kind of power.
==========
2017 10:58:14
distribution as virtually synonymous with corruption. The ability of governments to

generate rents encourages many ambitious people to choose politics rather than
entrepreneurship
==========
2017 10:58:18
The ability of governments to generate rents encourages many ambitious people to

choose politics rather than entrepreneurship
==========
2017 10:58:30
The ability of governments to generate rents encourages many ambitious people to

choose politics rather than entrepreneurship or the private sector as a route to
wealth.
==========
2017 11:00:01
Economist Mushtaq Khan points out that many Asian governments have promoted
industrialization by allowing favored firms to generate excess profits, provided
they are plowed back into new investment. While this opened the door to
considerable corruption and abuse, it also stimulated rapid growth at a rate
possibly higher than market forces on their own would have produced.
==========
2017 11:05:51
In a modern democracy, we expect citizens to vote for politicians based on their

promises of broad public policies, or what political scientists label a
“programmatic” agenda.
==========
2017 11:13:37
not to individuals but to broad classes of people. The government is in particular

not supposed to give a benefit
==========
2017 11:13:45
The government is in particular not supposed to give a benefit to specific

individuals based on whether or not they supported it.
==========
2017 11:14:14
In a clientelistic system, politicians provide individualized benefits only to

political supporters in exchange for their votes. These benefits can include jobs
in the public sector, cash payments, political favors, or even public goods like
schools and clinics that are selectively given only to political supporters.
==========
2017 11:46:30
Modern bureaucracies are built on a foundation of merit, technical competence, and

impersonality.
==========
2017 11:48:01
clientelistic relationship is by definition between unequals, in which powerful

and/or wealthy politicians in effect buy the support of ordinary citizens. These
politicians are typically interested in promoting their own narrow interests. They
may be interested in promoting the welfare of the clients who provide their base of
support but not the public at large.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 99 | location 1518-1519 | Added on Friday, 29 December
2017 15:56:50
human beings are born with a suite of emotions that fortify the development of
social relationships based on cooperation with friends and family.
==========
2017 15:57:21
It is only with the development of political institutions like the modern state
that humans begin to organize themselves and learn to cooperate in a manner that
transcends friends and family. When such institutions break down, we revert to
patronage and nepotism as a default form of sociability.
==========
2017 15:59:58
their modern forms, they are structured to operate by impersonal and transparent
rules. But these organizations are often rigid and hard to direct; leaders
typically rely on smaller networks of supporters they have cultivated on their rise
to the top.
==========
2017 16:00:05
In their modern forms, they are structured to operate by impersonal and transparent
rules. But these organizations are often rigid and hard to direct; leaders
typically rely on smaller networks of supporters they have cultivated on their rise
to the top.
==========
2017 16:00:51
Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party and the Chinese Communist Party are riven with
leadership factions based on patronage networks.
==========
2017 16:04:00
networks dispense favors not based on a direct face-to-face relationship between

the patron and his or her clients but rather through a series of intermediaries who
are enlisted to recruit followers.
==========
2017 16:05:39
The patrons must, furthermore, persuasively signal that they will deliver on their
promises of individualized benefits. One of the reasons that ethnic voting is so
common in democracies from urban America in the nineteenth century to India or
Kenya today is that ethnicity serves as a credible indication that a particular
political boss will deliver the goods to a targeted audience.
==========
2017 16:09:55
In societies where incomes and educational levels are low, it is often far easier
to get supporters to the polls based on a promise of an individual benefit rather
than a broad programmatic agenda.
==========
2017 16:11:16
This is a simple matter of economics: poor voters can be more easily bought than
rich ones, with relatively small individual benefits like a cash gift or a promise
of a low-skill
==========
2017 16:11:25
of a low-skill job.
==========
2017 16:11:31
of a low-skill job.
==========
2017 16:12:05
countries become wealthier, the benefits politicians need

==========
2017 16:12:14
As countries become wealthier, the benefits politicians need

==========
2017 16:12:17
As countries become wealthier, the benefits politicians need to offer to bribe

voters increase, and the cost of clientelism rises dramatically.
==========
2017 16:13:47
Most poor countries lack a strong private sector and opportunities for
entrepreneurship: indeed, this is why they are poor in the first place.
==========
2017 16:14:10
main ladder of upward social mobility.

==========
16:48:42
degree than many other Western societies, the United States has a dense and complex
network of voluntary
==========
16:48:49
the United States has a dense and complex network of voluntary organizations:
churches, professional societies, charitable institutions, private schools,
universities, and hospitals, and, of course, a very strong private business sector.
==========
16:49:07
Max Weber after visiting the United States around the end of the nineteenth
century: “In the past and up to the very present, it has been a characteristic
precisely of the specifically American democracy that it did not constitute a
formless sand heap of individuals, but rather a buzzing complex of strictly
exclusive, yet voluntary associations.”
==========
- Your Highlight on page 60 | location 908-910 | Added on Saturday, 30 December
2017 06:48:14
Family life, which constitutes the smallest and most basic form of association, has
deteriorated markedly since the 1960s with a sharp increase in rates of divorce and
single-parent families. Beyond the family, too, there has been a steady breakdown
of older communities like neighborhoods, churches, and workplaces.
==========
2017 06:50:19
The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) has become famous around
the world as the guiding intelligence behind postwar Japanese economic development.
==========
2017 06:51:55
When a Japanese executive goes to work, he toils not just for himself, his family,
and his company but for the greater glory of the Japanese nation as well.
==========
2017 07:00:47
As we will see in the following chapters, the essence of Chinese Confucianism is

familism. Confucianism promotes a tremendous strengthening of family bonds through
moral education and the elevation of the importance of the family above other sorts
of social ties. In this respect, the Chinese family is much stronger and more
cohesive than the Japanese family.
==========
2017 07:01:18
the strength of the family bond implies a certain weakness

==========
2017 07:01:32
there is a relatively low degree of trust in Chinese society the moment one steps
outside the family circle. Hence the distribution of associations in Chinese
societies like Taiwan or Hong Kong resembles that of France.
==========
2017 07:05:12
The question of family life was suddenly politicized, with the left accusing
Republicans of narrow-minded gay bashing and hostility to single mothers, and the
right countering that feminism, gay rights, and the welfare system had contributed
to the precipitous decline in the strength and stability of American families.
==========
2017 07:06:26
Swimming against this tide were a number of immigrant groups that seemed to do well
in the United States because they retained a strong family structure from the
cultures out of which they came, structures that had not yet been undermined by the
broader atomizing currents of mainstream American life.
==========
2017 07:06:50
family paradoxically does not always play a positive role in promoting economic
growth.
==========
2017 07:12:14
Family control is diluted first through bank borrowing, which gives the creditor
some voice in the running of the business, and then through public equity
offerings.
==========
2017 07:13:06
At this point family businesses face a critical choice: try to retain control of
their enterprises within the family, which is often tantamount to opting for
continuing small size, or give up control and become, in effect, passive
shareholders.
==========
2017 07:15:58
Max Weber, in his book The Religion of China, argued that the strong Chinese family
created what he called “sib fetters” (overly restrictive family bonds),
constraining the development of universal values and the impersonal social ties
necessary for modern business organization.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 105 | location 1604-1605 | Added on Sunday, 31 December
2017 12:46:30
how clientelism deepened in Greece despite modernization

==========
2017 12:47:38
Maastricht Treaty creating the euro provided for a common currency and monetary
policy without a corresponding common fiscal policy.
==========
2017 12:48:21
This led to the fall of incumbent governments in both countries, and to leadership
by technocratic caretaker administrations that sought to impose dramatic austerity
programs to get public spending more in line with revenues.
==========
2017 12:48:35
“shadow economies,”
==========
2017 12:57:35
New social actors can be recruited into well-established clientelistic systems and
be induced to play by their rules.
==========
2017 12:57:57
This is further evidence that political development does not follow a single path,
and that the different components of development can proceed along parallel but
ultimately divergent trajectories.
==========
2017 13:01:56
Village houses are so placed that events in all but a few are shielded from the
eyes of the rest of the community … When a rural Greek is hospitalized, relatives
are in constant attendance to keep a check on the doctor and the treatment he
prescribes.9
==========
2017 13:02:43
In such societies, neighbors are not potential helpmates but dangerous rivals,
which is why domestic architecture in all of these places tends to turn inward to
hide the family’s wealth from prying eyes. In such societies, businesses tend to
remain small and family owned over the generations, rather than evolving into
large-scale modern corporations run by hierarchies of professional managers.
Businesses often keep two sets of books, an accurate one for the family and another
for the tax collector; rampant tax evasion is socially approved because the state
is regarded as just another dangerous stranger.
==========
2017 13:03:56
The low-trust, family-oriented society of the Greek countryside thus became the
urban society of the early twentieth century.
==========
2017 13:07:10
The liberation of Greece was in a sense one of the first instances of what is now
called “humanitarian intervention,” in which strong moral concerns on the part of
the international community were combined with strategic self-interest to promote
military intervention.
==========
2017 13:09:02
Greece was occupied during World War II first by the Italians and then by the
Germans. Greek society had split by this point along ideological
==========
2017 13:09:07
Greece was occupied during World War II first by the Italians and then by the
Germans.
==========
2017 13:12:37
investment began to flow into the country. Large-scale urbanization occurred around
the turn of the twentieth century, but this was based more on cities as
administrative, cultural, and commercial centers than as sources of industrial
employment—a process sometimes referred to as “modernization without development.”
==========
2017 13:19:32
At the same time, the rise of the Soviet Union led to the formation of sympathetic
Communist parties around the world based on an ideological form of mass
mobilization.
==========
2017 13:26:07
While it was PASOK that politicized the hiring of teachers and bank workers in the
above cases, both parties participated in stuffing the public sector with their own
followers.
==========
2017 13:26:19
Following each election, they sought to purge their rival’s political appointees
and replace them with their own.
==========
2017 13:34:52
absence of a strong tradition of indigenous statehood.

==========
2017 13:35:26
The Greeks fought bravely for their freedom but were unable to achieve it on their
own; even after independence, foreign influence remained strong, as the linkages of
the first Greek political parties to different Great Powers attest.
==========
2017 13:35:42
The Greeks fought bravely for their freedom but were unable to achieve it on their
own; even after independence, foreign influence remained strong, as the linkages of
the first Greek political parties to different Great Powers attest. These foreign
influences were evident in the country’s fluctuating borders over the centuries.
This pattern of foreign influence continued up through World War II and the cold
war, where Greece was a pawn in larger international struggles.
==========
2017 13:36:50
very deep. Distrust of government

==========
2017 13:36:54
Distrust of government is related to the Greek inability to collect taxes.

==========
- Your Highlight on page 120 | location 1832-1833 | Added on Monday, 1 January 2018
03:42:35
In the absence of entrepreneurial opportunities, Greeks sought jobs in the state

sector, and politicians seeking to mobilize votes were happy to oblige.
==========
03:42:47
Greek pattern of urbanization in which whole villages moved from the countryside
preserved intact rural patronage networks, networks that
==========
03:42:52
Greek pattern of urbanization in which whole villages moved from the countryside
preserved intact rural patronage networks, networks that industry-based development
tended to dissolve.
==========
03:43:24
Some social scientists have argued that trust is the by-product of other forces in
a society, like an effective government, or else strong economic growth that allows
everyone to get richer together.
==========
03:44:42
When the European Union and the IMF demanded structural reforms in return for a
restructuring of Greek debt, the Greek government was willing to consider virtually
any form of austerity before agreeing to end party control over patronage. The
situation of Italy
==========
03:44:54
When the European Union and the IMF demanded structural reforms in return for a
restructuring of Greek debt, the Greek government was willing to consider virtually
any form of austerity before agreeing to end party control over patronage.
==========
04:06:43
He argued further that one of the important sources of poor government performance
was the region’s long history of clientelism.
==========
04:11:19
Putnam argued that social capital was generated in self-governing city-states such
as Genoa, Florence, and Venice, that flourished during the Middle Ages through the
Renaissance. These republics cultivated virtues of loyalty and trust, and were
organized around oligarchic institutions of self-rule. Southern Italy, by contrast,
was shaped by the centralized and autocratic rule of the Norman kings of Naples and
Sicily, whose predominant mode of social organization was the patron-client
relationship.
==========
04:13:33
the development of centralized state authority is a necessary condition for modern

government, but it tells you little about the degree of political freedom that will
exist in a given society.
==========
04:20:05
bumpkins.”
==========
04:21:41
The very terms patronus and cliens were Roman and referred to a highly formalized
legal relationship between a superior and an inferior
==========
09:23:03
Under a unified national Italian government, tariffs were introduced to protect

northern industry and the inefficient landowners of the South.
==========
09:23:19
This heightened the role of the local landowning classes at the expense of industry
and encouraged the middle classes there not to go into entrepreneurship but to buy
land for themselves and join the local oligarchy.
==========
09:31:11
the Mafia is simply a private organization providing a needed service that is

normally performed by the state—that is, use of the threat of violence (and
sometimes actual violence) to enforce property rights.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 133 | location 2027-2029 | Added on Wednesday, 3 January
2018 06:28:14
There were, in addition, large improvements in social indicators such as literacy
and infant mortality that made the South far less like “Africa” than in the
nineteenth century.
==========
2018 11:56:19
Berlusconi prime ministerships did little better. Some modest reforms were launched
in the 1990s focusing on universities, local governments, and bureaucratic red
tape, with some effect.
==========
2018 12:14:50
Trust becomes a valuable commodity only when it exists as the by-product of a

society whose members practice social virtues like honesty, reliability, and
openness.
==========
2018 12:15:12
Trust makes no sense unless it reflects a general condition of trustworthy

behavior; under these conditions, it becomes the marker and facilitator of
cooperation. Of course, an opportunist could try to take advantage of other
people’s trust and try to cheat them. But if one wants to live in the community,
this will quickly lead to ostracism and shunning.
==========
2018 12:17:36
In many poor countries, as we will see in Part II, families have to leave a member
at home all day to prevent their neighbors from stealing from their garden or
dispossessing them of their house altogether.
==========
2018 12:17:41
dispossessing them of their house altogether.
==========
2018 12:17:50
dispossessing them of their house altogether. All of these constitute what
economists call transaction costs, which can be saved if one lives in a high-trust
society.
==========
2018 12:18:10
People are much more likely to comply with a law if they see that other people
around them are doing so as well.
==========
2018 12:19:50
A low-trust society constitutes what economists call a collective action problem.

==========
2018 12:20:12
Since distrust feeds on itself, everyone is trapped in what is known as a low-level

equilibrium, where everyone is worse off but no one can break out.
==========
2018 12:20:22
By contrast, if the government were clean, honest, and competent, then people would
be willing to trust it and follow its lead.
==========
2018 15:01:18
Finally, the nature of the ties linking members of the Taiwanese network
organizations is different: they are largely based on family. In this respect they
are much more similar to the Korean chaebol, whose linkages are also kinship based,
than to the Japanese keiretsu, which are publicly owned corporations tied to one
another through cross-shareholdings.20 The reason
==========
2018 15:01:23
another
==========
2018 15:01:27
another through cross-shareholdings.
==========
2018 15:05:35
The Chinese difficulty in moving to professional management is related to the

nature of Chinese familism.
==========
2018 15:08:55
Nonfamily managers in Chinese companies are not given large equity stakes in their
businesses and often complain of a lack of openness when dealing with the boss.
Furthermore, they usually hit a glass ceiling in promotion, since a family member
will always be preferred for important positions.
==========
2018 15:09:06
the problem of nepotism, which Weber and others saw as a severe constraint on
modernization, has not disappeared from Chinese economic life despite the
remarkable recent economic growth of Chinese societies.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 88 | location 1338-1340 | Added on Thursday, 4 January
2018 06:17:34
In the case of very successful families, the grandchildren have grown up in very
well-to-do surroundings. Unlike the founding entrepreneur, they more readily take
their prosperity for granted and are typically less motivated to make the
sacrifices needed to keep the business competitive, or else they have developed
interests in other types of activities.
==========
2018 06:21:16
If the cartel-like structure of the Japanese economy seems anticompetitive, the

kaleidoscopically changing world of Chinese family firms appears, if anything,
overly competitive. A further
==========
2018 06:21:27
If the cartel-like structure of the Japanese economy seems anticompetitive, the

kaleidoscopically changing world of Chinese family firms appears, if anything,
overly competitive.
==========
2018 06:22:28
dearth
==========
2018 06:23:44
but only rarely does a Chinese company establish the brand name itself. The reasons
that this is so should be clear from the account of the evolution of Chinese family
firms. Because of their reluctance to develop to professional management, they are
constrained from integrating forward, particularly into unfamiliar overseas
markets, which require the marketing skills of native inhabitants.
==========
2018 11:23:23
small, family-managed firm is highly flexible and can make decisions rapidly.
Compared to a large, hierarchical Japanese firm with its cumbersome system of
consensual decision making, a small Chinese business is much better equipped to
respond to overnight changes in market demand.
==========
2018 11:41:16
The Chinese communists came to power in 1949 determined to break the hold of
Chinese familism on Chinese society.
==========
2018 11:42:47
A proper understanding of the role of the family in Chinese culture is key to

understanding the nature of Chinese economic society, as well as that of other
familistic societies around the world today. Confucianism, to a much greater degree
==========
2018 11:42:58
A proper understanding of the role of the family in Chinese culture is key to

understanding the nature of Chinese economic society, as well as that of
==========
2018 11:45:18
These ethical principles define the proper nature of a wide variety of social
relationships, the central five of which are held to be those of ruler-minister,
father-son, husband-wife, elder—younger brother, and friend-friend.
==========
2018 11:47:47
Tu Wei-ming characterizes as “political Confucianism,”

==========
2018 11:48:10
Tu Wei-ming characterizes as “political Confucianism,” that is, Confucianism’s

support for a hierarchical system of social relations, with an emperor at the top
and a class of gentlemen-scholars manning an elaborate centralized bureaucracy
below him.
==========
2018 11:52:32
people like that of a father toward his children. In
==========
2018 11:52:40
In this system, meritocratic advancement was possible through a series of imperial

examinations for entry into the bureaucracy, but the social ideal to which the
examinees aspired was that of a scholar versed in the traditional Confucian texts.
==========
2018 15:58:47
Therapy is different in every case. When a doctor tells me that he adheres strictly
to this or that method, I have my doubts about his therapeutic effect.
==========
2018 16:12:17
That was how everything always went in Fuling—things happened to me. Usually I
liked the passive unpredictability but today I was suspicious of her intentions,
and yet I had no idea what to do.
==========
2018 16:29:26
neck—and then he laughs. But it is the unsettling Chinese laugh that has nothing to
do with humor. It simply takes the place of words that aren’t there.
==========
2018 16:31:12
same. One of the Characteristics of Chinese Socialism is that small enterprises can
engage in virtually unrestricted capitalism, which works to the advantage of the
Huang family.
==========
2018 16:31:22
One of the Characteristics of Chinese Socialism is that small enterprises can

engage in virtually unrestricted capitalism, which works to the advantage of the
Huang family.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 275 | location 4210-4213 | Added on Friday, 5 January 2018
00:28:11
He sits in front of the ingredients: a bowl of pork filling, a plate of small

square dough wrappers, a bowl of water, a pan. He holds a chopstick. He picks up a
wrapper in one hand. With the chopstick he draws out a pinch of pork filling and
places it in the square of dough. Then he dips the chopstick in the water, and uses
it to fold the corners of the wrapper around the meat. The finished dumpling
extends in two points, one crossing on top of the other. He drops the dumpling into
the pan.
==========
00:53:01
Chi fan meiyou? Have you eaten yet?

==========
01:01:15
If they chose to find work on their own, they had to repay the scholarship they had
received, which usually amounted to around five thousand yuan.
==========
02:41:50
Through much of Chinese history, taxation was highly arbitrary; the state
subcontracted tax collection to local officials or tax farmers, who were free to
set the level of taxation at whatever the local population could endure.
==========
09:31:06
Lineages usually possess some common property, such as an ancestral hall that is
used for ritual purposes, and some of them maintain highly developed sets of rules
and genealogical records dating back over many centuries.33 Economically, lineages
have performed the function of widening the circle of kinship, and therefore the
number of people who can be trusted in an economic enterprise. Obligations to
members of one’s lineage are of a much lower order than toward one’s family. The
same lineages can encompass very rich families and very poor ones, and the richer
members have no particular obligation to help the poorer ones.34 Lineages can often
be fictitious: people with the same surname like Chang or Li and coming from the
same area will assume that they belong to the same lineage, while their actual
degree of kinship may be nonexistent.35 Nonetheless, kinship ties, however
attenuated, provide the basis for a degree of trust and obligation not present in
the case of complete strangers, and vastly increase the pool of people one can
safely bring into a family business.36
==========
09:32:09
favorable treatment because of their kinship

==========
09:32:23
The existence of these kinship ties has given the overseas Chinese the confidence
to invest in the PRC, even in the absence of property rights or a stable political
environment.
==========
10:06:25
A negative, antiforeigner sense of national identity was forged in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by China’s occupation, first by European
colonial powers and then by Japan.
==========
10:07:56
But as many Chinese have noted about themselves, they suffer from a low degree of
“spontaneous” citizenship, measured by such things as the proclivity of people to
abuse common areas, their willingness to contribute to charity, keep public spaces
clean, volunteer for public interest—oriented groups, or die for their country.
==========
10:11:07
Jenner points out that many Chinese Communist party officials, despite their
Marxist ideology, have spent the past decade establishing foreign bank accounts and
educating their children in the West, in preparation for the day that they may be
out of power. For them no less than for the most humble peasant, the family will
remain the only safe refuge.47
==========
10:17:55
noted, for example, that in such a society people will fear and distrust the
government while simultaneously believing in the need for a strong state to control
their fellow citizens. As in noncommunist Chinese societies, the degree of
citizenship and identification with larger institutions is weak. But the economic
effects of amoral familism were evident as well: “Lack of such association [beyond
the family] is a very important limiting factor in the way of economic development
in most of the world. Except as people can create and maintain corporate
organization, they cannot have a modern economy.”3 Most of the residents of
Montegrano were peasants very close to subsistence; the industrial employment that
existed in such communities would have to come from the outside, probably in the
form of a state-run company. Noting that the large landowners of the region could
have built a profitable factory, they nonetheless chose not to do so because they
believed that the state had an obligation to shoulder the risk.4 Banfield’s
argument needs to be qualified and
==========
10:18:22
“amoral familism,”
==========
10:18:27
He noted, for example, that in such a society people will fear and distrust the
government while simultaneously believing in the need for a strong state to control
their fellow citizens.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 116 | location 1777-1779 | Added on Saturday, 6 January
2018 16:16:10
Many observers of small family businesses in the Terza Italia have noted their
tendency to cluster together into industrial districts of the sort first identified
in the nineteenth century by Alfred Marshall, where they can take advantage of
local pools of skills and knowledge. These districts were regarded as Italy’s
version of California’s Silicon Valley or Boston’s Route 128.
==========
2018 16:28:30
associated social and cultural features—the celebrated Norman feudal aristocracy of

the South and the fertile communal republicanism of the North.”
==========
- Your Highlight on page 129 | location 1976-1978 | Added on Sunday, 7 January 2018
06:21:37
In later years, France was to become the country that invented the concept of la
carrière overte aux talents (“careers open to talent”), based on objective criteria
of merit rather than birth or inherited social status.
==========
06:28:51
Indeed, many of the distinctive characteristics of the French economy can be traced
to French familism. Some observers have argued that French industry suffered from a
Malthusian market organization that exposed a large number of small firms to
“excessive” competition, driving down their profitability or leading them to
cartelize to protect market shares.15 But market structure is an effect, not a
cause, of firms trying to reap scale economies.
==========
09:47:43
Frenchmen of equal status, in other words, find it difficult to solve problems

between themselves without reference to a higher, more centralized form of
authority.
==========
09:51:54
Tocqueville notes that the most pernicious aspect of the tax system was its
inequality, since it made people conscious of their differences and jealous of each
other’s privileges.
==========
09:54:33
anarchosyndicalism
==========
09:57:48
“The system of control and inspection by guild officials could be so comprehensive
that, during the time of Colbert, even ordinary cloth required at least six
inspections.”33 Thus, the guilds did not see their purpose as the defense of craft
traditions against the encroachments of outsiders, including the state. Rather,
they depended on the state to protect them from competition, to legitimate their
powers and to enforce their control over economic life.
==========
10:06:55
It also has strong incentives to use the firm for political ends like job creation
and patronage.
==========
10:14:05
Rather, there was a collection of well-connected officeholders of questionable

competence and often nonexistent training.
==========
10:15:38
quasi-governmental authority on the subcontinent. The very term “civil service”

originated in India as a means of distinguishing the East India Company’s civilian
employees from its military ones.4
==========
10:21:49
These reformist ideas were circulated through a new popular media read by the
middle class, and by the countless new clubs and societies that sprang up in the
first half of the nineteenth century to promote industry, science, technology, and
reform like the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
==========
- Your Note on page 149 | location 2270 | Added on Sunday, 7 January 2018 10:22:02
Lions club in nepal

==========
10:25:05
The British middle classes chose to advocate universalistic, merit-based standards

of advancement in all institutions. They did this out of self-interest, but as a
general social class rather than as individuals. This stood in sharp contrast to
the less entrepreneurial middle classes in southern Italy, who were co-opted by the
local oligarchy and incorporated into its patronage networks.
==========
15:32:24
The most clientelistic party in this period was the Conservative or Tory party,
many of whose leaders were influential landowners who could draw on support from
their nonelite rural constituents.
==========
Maps of Meaning_ The Architecture of Belief - Jordan B. Peterson
- Your Highlight on page 8-8 | Added on Sunday, 7 January 2018 15:40:36
who to support, or
==========
Maps of Meaning: The Architecture (Jordan B. Peterson)
16:19:09
Many of the party activists I had encountered were using the ideals of social
justice, to rationalize their pursuit of personal revenge.
==========
16:22:35
merely to disguise frequent doubt and profound disquietude.

==========
16:27:09
Surprisingly, however, the desire to stab someone with my pen disappeared. In

retrospect, I would say that the behavioral urge had manifested itself in explicit
knowledge – had been translated from emotion and image to concrete realization –
and had no further “reason” to exist.
==========
16:29:05
All the things I “believed” were things I thought sounded good, admirable,
respectable, courageous.
==========
16:29:19
They weren’t my things, however – I had stolen them. Most of them I had taken from
books. Having “understood” them, abstractly, I presumed I had a right to them –
presumed that I could adopt them, as if they were mine: presumed that they were me.
==========
07:07:36
what there is, what to do about what there is,

==========
07:12:24
We are not yet “objective,” even in our most clear-headed moments

==========
07:15:07
specific affective relevance or behavioral significance. We

==========
07:16:09
Alternatively, it might be suggested that all the myth has not yet vanished from
science, devoted as it is to human progress, and that it is this nontrivial
remainder that enables the scientist to retain undimmed enthusiasm, while he
endlessly studies his fruitflies.
==========
07:22:09
Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams.

==========
07:38:26
(If a culture survives, and grows, does that not indicate in some profound way that
the ideas it is based upon are valid?
==========
07:46:39
To act is literally to manifest preference about one set of possibilities,

contrasted to an infinite set of alternatives.
==========
07:49:54
believe that we have outgrown our gullibility. The rise of the New Age movement in
the West, for example – as compensation for the decline of traditional spirituality
– provides sufficient evidence for our continued ability to swallow a camel, while
straining at a gnat.
==========
07:50:02
The rise of the New Age movement in the West, for example – as compensation for the
decline of traditional spirituality – provides sufficient evidence for our
continued ability to swallow a camel, while straining at a gnat.
==========
08:02:43
mere alteration in behavior is insufficient. We must change not only what we do,
but what we think is important. This means reconsideration of the nature of the
motivational significance of the present, and reconsideration of the ideal nature
of the future.
==========
08:03:52
The basic grammatical structure of transformational mythology, so to speak, appears

most clearly revealed in the form of the “way” (as in the “American Way of Life”).
The great literary critic Northrop Frye comments upon the idea of the way, as it
manifests itself in literature and religious writing: “Following a narrative is
closely connected with the central literary metaphor of the journey, where we have
a person making the journey and the road, path,
==========
08:03:58
The basic grammatical structure of transformational mythology, so to speak, appears

most clearly revealed in the form of the “way” (as in the “American Way of Life”).
The great literary critic Northrop Frye comments upon the idea of the way, as it
manifests itself in literature and religious writing: “Following a narrative is
closely connected with the central literary metaphor of the journey, where we have
a person making the journey and the road, path, or direction taken, the simplest
word for this being ‘way.’
==========
08:11:18
When we are in trouble, we get scared. When we are in the domain of the known, so
to speak, there is no reason for fear. Outside that domain, panic reigns. It is for
this reason that we dislike having our plans disrupted. So we cling to what we
understand. This does not always work, however, because what we understand about
the present is not always necessarily sufficient to deal with the future.
==========
08:11:42
Too much modification – chaos. Too little modification – stagnation (and then, when
the future
==========
08:11:47
future we are unprepared for appears – chaos).

==========
08:41:14
requirements of a democratic political system with a rapidly expanding franchise.

Despite the exclusion of African Americans, women, Native Americans, and
propertyless men
==========
08:41:59
As an area of new settlement (at least for Europeans), North America appeared as a
land of equal opportunity where one’s station in life reflected one’s own work and
talents.
==========
08:44:15
America faced no powerful neighbors that could threaten it, and its physical size
and dispersed rural population meant it would almost inevitably have to be governed
on a decentralized basis.
==========
08:46:02
Many people today marvel at the quality of political leadership at the time of
America’s founding, the sophistication of the discourse revealed in the Federalist
Papers, and the ability to think about institutions in a long-term perspective.
==========
08:46:16
At least part of the reason for this strong leadership was that America at the time
was not a full democracy but rather a highly elitist society, many of whose leaders
were graduates of Harvard and Yale. Like the British elite, many of them knew each
other personally from school and from their common participation in the revolution
and drafting of the Constitution.
==========
08:51:34
destroy the new nation,” as did his successor, John Adams, who argued that “a
division of the republic into two great parties … is to be dreaded as the greatest
political evil under our Constitution.”
==========
08:57:21
The Scotch-Irish were poor but intensely proud both in Britain and in the United
States. The more elite English found this pride irritating since, in the words of
historian David Hackett Fischer, they “could not understand what they had to feel
proud about.”
==========
09:01:22
No country, the United States included, ever leaps to a modern political system in
a single bound.
==========
09:51:15
The spontaneous emergence of these machines in response to an expanding base of

relatively poor voters again suggests that clientelism is an efficient way of
energizing this type of population and therefore should be seen as an early form of
democratic participation.
==========
09:51:41
America, by contrast, clientelism was a way for ambitious but nonelite politicians
to become wealthy and increase their social status, while delivering concrete
benefits to their supporters.
==========
09:54:55
One of the reasons socialism never took hold in the United States is that the
Republican and Democratic Parties captured the votes of working-class Americans by
offering short-term rewards instead of long-term programmatic policy changes.
==========
09:59:03
America in the 1880s had many similarities to contemporary developing countries. It

had democratic institutions and competitive elections, but votes were bought with
the currency of public office.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 172 | location 2635-2635 | Added on Tuesday, 9 January
2018 06:36:10
new generation of city managers replaced the old party bosses.

==========
2018 06:38:38
Most important was a revolution in transportation and communications technology;

railroads and the telegraph now united the country on a continental scale and
vastly increased the size of markets. As Adam Smith explained, the division of
labor is limited by the size of the market. Americans began leaving their farms and
rural communities in increasing numbers, moving to cities
==========
2018 06:38:44
Most important was a revolution in transportation and communications technology;

railroads and the telegraph now united the country on a continental scale and
vastly increased the size of markets. As Adam Smith explained, the division of
labor is limited by the size of the market. Americans began leaving their farms and
rural communities in increasing numbers, moving to cities and settling the
country’s new western territories.
==========
2018 06:41:33
continuing support for the patronage system. Reading the handwriting on the wall,
==========
2018 06:41:39
Reading the handwriting on the wall,

==========
2018 06:42:49
he argued in favor of a strict separation between politics and administration.

==========
2018 06:43:13
Wilson, who had learned German, referred to Hegel and the bureaucratic models of
Prussia and France, whose governments “made themselves too efficient to be
dispensed with.”
==========
2018 06:45:34
tradition of Alexander Hamilton by arguing that strong centralized government was

necessary for a whole host of purposes, from regulation of railroads and telegraph
to control of large corporations that in many cases were seeking to monopolize the
markets in which they operated.
==========
2018 06:45:56
has exercised itself much more in controlling than in energizing government.

==========
2018 06:53:05
These groups began agitating against corruption through reports and publicity about
the backgrounds of candidates published in sympathetic newspapers; they sought to
professionalize government by making it nonpartisan.
==========
2018 06:53:17
Ironically, while this group spoke in the name of democracy, it actually

represented the upper crust of Chicago society, an overwhelmingly Protestant group
that looked down on the way that Lorimer was empowering the city’s new Catholic and
Jewish immigrants.
==========
2018 06:56:07
The middle classes in the United States played a similar role in pushing for
change; the difference was that their opponent was not an aristocracy but an
entrenched party system.
==========
2018 06:59:05
final group that formed part of the Progressive coalition were urban social
reformers who dealt directly with the conditions of the contemporary city—people
==========
2018 07:00:33
Social mobilization will not take place in the absence of ideas. New social classes
may exist de facto—that is, groups of people with similar backgrounds, needs, and
status—but they will not act collectively if they are not conscious of themselves
as a group. In this respect, intellectuals play a critical role in interpreting the
world, explaining to the public the nature of its own self-interest, and positing a
different world that alternative public policies might make possible.
==========
2018 07:03:39
The civil service reform movement was led by professionals of various sorts—
lawyers, academics, journalists, and the like. In Stephen Skowronek’s words, they
represented the “key link between America’s old patrician elite and its new
professional sector. Their roots lay in established American families and high New
England culture.”
==========
2018 07:03:48
This new middle-class elite sought reforms against the interests of a political
class that had succeeded in mobilizing the vast mass of nonelite voters into the
patronage system.
==========
2018 07:05:10
So while many of them sought advancement of their material interests, the

passionate moralism of the movement was generated by the demand for recognition of
the values of education, merit, organization, and honesty that this class of
individuals believed they themselves embodied.26
==========
2018 10:34:41
Teddy Roosevelt was an extraordinarily energetic individual who took the

Hamiltonian view that the executive branch needed to exert independent authority,
stretching existing views of the constitutional prerogatives of the presidency to a
breaking point. Roosevelt had been a member of the Civil Service Commission for six
years, and he used his presidential powers to greatly expand and strengthen the
merit-based part of the federal government—something that was easier to do because
his predecessor had been a Republican and had already filled the government with
patronage appointments.
==========
2018 10:41:43
The fact that the United States had a clientelistic system in the first place had
to do with the fact that it was democratic earlier than most European countries,
and that it had not already created a strong, autonomous state at the point when
the franchise was first opened up.
==========
2018 10:43:06
Britain’s Westminster system allows for rapid decision making by whatever party
holds a majority in Parliament. In the United States, by contrast, power is divided
between the president and Congress; Congress itself has a powerful upper house, and
its two chambers can be held by different political parties. The federal system
that distributes power to states and local governments means that reforms taken at
a national level do not necessarily spread across the country. Some states began
reform of their patronage systems before the federal government; others lagged well
behind.
==========
2018 10:43:14
Britain’s Westminster system allows for rapid decision making by whatever party
holds a majority in Parliament. In the United States, by contrast, power is divided
between the president and Congress; Congress itself has a powerful upper house, and
its two chambers can be held by different political parties. The federal system
that distributes power to states and local governments means that reforms taken at
a national level do not necessarily spread across the country. Some states began
reform of their patronage systems before the federal government; others lagged well
behind.
==========
2018 10:43:34
Finally, the two nations were very different socially. In Britain, a rising middle
class got early access to elite educational institutions like Oxford and Cambridge
and negotiated reform in the clubs and back rooms of London. There was a comparable
American elite in the graduates of Harvard and Yale who led the civil service
reform movement, but they were dominant only in the Northeast and had to seek
allies outside their social class over a geographically vast and diverse country.
==========
2018 10:44:20
The first is that reform is a profoundly political process, not a technical one.
There are of course technical characteristics of a modern bureaucratic system such
as job classifications, examination requirements, promotion ladders, and the like.
But clientelistic systems do not exist because the officials staffing them, or the
politicians who stand behind them, somehow don’t understand how to organize an
efficient agency. Clientelism exists because incumbents benefit from the system,
either as political bosses who get access to power and resources, or as their
clients who get jobs and perks.
==========
2018 10:45:58
The problem in assembling a reform coalition is that the existing clientelistic

politicians will also try to recruit these groups to their cause. In the United
States, many of the railroads—exemplars of industrial modernity—learned to play the
corrupt patronage game. This meant that the reform coalition had to include older,
economically less modern groups like small farmers, and shippers whose interests
were hurt by the railroads.
==========
2018 10:47:57
A fourth lesson is that reform takes a great deal of time. The Pendleton Act was
passed in 1883, but it was not until the 1920s that a large majority of public
servants were put under the merit classification system.
==========
2018 10:49:41
On the one hand, the merit system was created to protect public employees from
patronage and the excessive politicization of the bureaucracy. On the other hand,
those same protective rules could be used to shield bureaucrats from
accountability, making them hard to fire when they failed to perform.
==========
2018 10:50:41
So a full account of the process of American state building should include not just
the elimination of corruption but also the development of governments that are
capable and autonomous enough to perform their functions at a high level, while
remaining fundamentally
==========
2018 10:50:46
So a full account of the process of American state building should include not just
the elimination of corruption but also the development of governments that are
capable and autonomous enough to perform their functions at a high level, while
remaining fundamentally accountable to a democratic citizenry.
==========
2018 12:26:39
First and perhaps most important, Korean network organizations were not centered
around a private bank or other financial institution in the way the Japanese
keiretsu are.8 This is because Korean commercial banks were all state owned until
their privatization in the early 1970s, while Korean industrial firms were
prohibited by law from acquiring more than an eight percent equity stake in any
bank.
==========
2018 14:27:25
The patient’s treatment begins with the doctor, so to speak. Only if the doctor
knows how to cope with himself and his own problems will he be able to teach the
patient to do the same.
==========
2018 14:30:38
Dreams are, after all, compensations for the conscious attitude.

==========
2018 14:45:36
which in reality was taking place elsewhere. The collective unconscious is common
to all; it is the foundation of what the ancients called the “sympathy of all
things.”
==========
2018 15:08:39
The finest and most significant conversations of my life were anonymous.

==========
- Your Highlight on page 171 | location 2622-2623 | Added on Friday, 12 January
2018 12:57:59
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right
and wrong.
==========
2018 22:19:58
to speak, withheld from consciousness. To me dreams are a part of nature, which

==========
2018 22:20:22
To me dreams are a part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive, but

expresses something as best it can, just as a plant grows or an animal seeks its
food as best it can. These forms of life, too, have no wish to deceive our eyes,
but we may deceive ourselves because our eyes are shortsighted. Or we hear amiss
because our ears are rather deaf—but it is not our ears that wish to deceive us.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 191 | location 2929-2929 | Added on Sunday, 14 January
2018 09:22:52
millennia after its inception in ancient China. Moreover, the state-building

project, once begun, was
==========
2018 09:22:57
Moreover, the state-building project, once begun, was a slow and laborious process,
subject to many setbacks and reversals.
==========
2018 09:25:41
Unlike in Europe, where the railroads were either developed by governments or were
placed early on under strict government supervision, the railroads in the United
States were almost entirely products of the free market.
==========
2018 09:27:19
Railroads resemble other public utilities such as telephones, electricity, and

broadband Internet in the need to reconcile
==========
2018 09:27:29
Railroads resemble other public utilities such as telephones, electricity, and

broadband Internet in the need to reconcile conflicting interests: while the
private parties investing in them want to maximize their returns on capital, which
dictates selective provision of services to certain buyers—large shippers and
producers in large cities—there is a countervailing political interest in
subsidizing universal service to smaller players and rural communities.
==========
2018 09:30:42
In 1885, a group of economists established the American Economic Association, which

broke away from the American Social Science Association and began formulating a
theoretical case for national railroad regulation.
==========
2018 09:30:58
Henry Carter Adams (who would go on to be the first chief economist of the
Interstate Commerce Commission), argued that the government needed to step in to
settle disputes over rates and prices because of market failures in the existing
system.
==========
2018 11:15:10
Much like their German or Japanese counterparts, these new officials had similar
backgrounds (indeed, often graduating together from the same schools) and embodied
a common belief in modern science and the need to apply rational methods to the
development of rural communities around the United States.
==========
2018 11:17:20
Pinchot in many ways embodied Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic, observing that “my
own money came from unearned increment on land in New York held by my grandfather,
who willed the money, not to the land, but to me. Having got my wages in advance in
that way, I am now trying to work them out.”23 Perhaps because his own family
==========
2018 11:17:27
Pinchot in many ways embodied Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic, observing that “my
own money came from unearned increment on land in New York held by my grandfather,
who willed the money, not to the land, but to me. Having got my wages in advance in
that way, I am now trying to work them out.”
==========
2018 11:19:05
What Pinchot lacked in academic knowledge of forests, he made up for through his
political connections and media savvy.
==========
2018 11:19:52
He created a centralized system of training and socialization for national

foresters built around the principles of expert, nonpartisan, and professional
forest management for the benefit of multiple users.
==========
2018 11:24:42
Of Taft, Pinchot said, “Weak rather than wicked, he was one of those genial men who
are everything that fancy paints until a showdown comes along that demands real
toughness of moral fiber.”
==========
2018 11:30:16
principal; here was a case of an agent run amok. Pinchot had an agenda for the
country that he believed was in the long-term public interest, and that agenda was
not necessarily coincident with that of the leaders of Congress. This is the
meaning of state autonomy: a government that is responsive to interest groups but
not owned by them,
==========
2018 11:30:25
Pinchot had an agenda for the country that he believed was in the long-term public
interest, and that agenda was not necessarily coincident with that of the leaders
of Congress. This is the meaning of state autonomy: a government that is responsive
to interest groups but not owned by them,
==========
2018 11:33:14
Clientelist politics was ended in the United States as the result of a long-term
political struggle between new middle-class actors who had a strong interest in
creating a more modern form of government and the older entrenched patronage
politicians.
==========
2018 11:33:58
Americans in some sense worshipped their Constitution, which embodied

universalistic values making the assimilation of new, culturally different
immigrants relatively easy.
==========
2018 11:34:13
Americanism constituted a set of values that could be adopted voluntarily rather

than an inherited ethnic characteristic.
==========
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (Eagleman, David)
14:37:48
this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life,
and the thought is blissful: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable
pieces, where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from
one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.
==========
The Wayfinders (Wade Davis)
14:40:21
remember the central revelation of anthropology: the idea

==========
14:40:34
the idea that the social world in which we live does not exist in some absolute
sense, but rather is simply one model of reality, the consequence of one set of
intellectual and spiritual choices that our particular cultural lineage made,
however successfully, many generations ago.
==========
14:41:32
You might think of this social web of life as an “ethnosphere,” a term perhaps best
defined as the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas
and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of
consciousness.
==========
14:52:55
anthropologists became servants of the Crown, agents dispatched to the far reaches
of empire with the task of understanding strange tribal peoples and cultures that
they might properly be administered and controlled.
==========
15:00:53
“The real threat to humanity,” Pinker writes, “comes from totalizing ideologies and
the denial of human rights, rather than curiosity about nature and nurture.”
==========
15:02:24
Science is only one way of knowing, and its purpose is not to generate absolute
truths but rather to inspire better and better ways of thinking about phenomena.
==========
16:33:08
follows, by definition, that all cultures share essentially the same mental acuity,
the same raw genius. Whether this intellectual capacity and potential is exercised
in stunning works of technological innovation, as has been the great achievement of
the West, or through the untangling of the complex threads of memory inherent in a
myth — a primary concern, for example, of the Aborigines of Australia — is simply a
matter of choice and orientation, adaptive insights and cultural priorities.
==========
16:53:29
reciprocity that forge the solidarity of San lives. To refuse a gift is an act of
hostility. To accept is to acknowledge both a connection and an obligation.
==========
16:53:36
To refuse a gift is an act of hostility. To accept is to acknowledge both a

connection and an obligation.
==========
16:54:05
the San associate the sun with death, fire symbolizes life, the unity of the
people, the survival of the family.
==========
16:54:07
the San associate the sun with death, fire symbolizes life, the unity of the
==========
16:54:10
symbolizes life, the unity of the people, the survival of the family.
==========
16:54:14
sacred fire. If the San associate the sun with death, fire symbolizes life, the
unity of the people, the survival of the family.
==========
16:54:19
If the San associate the sun with death, fire symbolizes life, the unity of the
==========
17:00:35
The art pays homage to that moment when human beings, through consciousness,
separated themselves from the animal realm, emerging as the unique entity that we
now know ourselves to be.
==========
17:02:38
Virtually all cultures would endorse most tenets of the Ten Commandments, not
because the Judaic world was uniquely inspired, but because it articulated the
rules that allowed a social species to thrive.
==========
17:12:43
In Nepal a stone path will take us to a door that will open to reveal the radiant
face of a wisdom hero, a Bodhisattva, Tsetsam Ani, a Buddhist nun who forty-five
years ago entered lifelong retreat.
==========
2018 17:54:15
I avoided all theoretical points of view and simply helped the patients to
understand the dream-images by themselves, without application of rules and
theories.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 193 | location 2953-2954 | Added on Monday, 15 January
2018 15:42:21
This moment was a turning point in my fate, but I gave in only after endless
resistances and with a sense of resignation. For it was a painfully humiliating
experience to realize that there was nothing to be done except play childish games.
==========
2018 15:44:42
Toward the autumn of 1913 the pressure which I had felt was in me seemed to be
moving outward, as though there were something in the air. The atmosphere actually
seemed to me darker than it had been. It was as though the sense of oppression no
longer sprang exclusively from a psychic situation, but from concrete reality. This
feeling grew more and more intense.
==========
2018 15:51:51
One of the greatest difficulties for me lay in dealing with my negative feelings. I
was voluntarily submitting myself to emotions of which I could not really approve,
and I was writing down fantasies which often struck me as nonsense, and toward
which I had strong resistances. For as long as we do not understand their meaning,
such fantasies are a diabolical mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. It cost
me a great deal to undergo them, but I had been challenged by fate. Only by extreme
effort was I finally able to escape from the labyrinth.
==========
2018 19:05:03
The effect is, in the words of one observer, that “while Koreans also are
relatively group-oriented, they also have a strong individualistic streak like most
Westerners. Koreans frequently joke that an individual Korean can beat an
individual Japanese, but that a group of Koreans are certain to be beaten by a
group of Japanese.”
==========
2018 20:44:10
The authoritarian governments that ruled Korea until the late 1980s effectively
outlawed strikes and made it illegal for unions to intervene in labor-management
disputes.
==========
2018 20:45:25
Moreover, the large chaebol have become brand names and broadly recognized national
champions; letting such a large enterprise split apart over a succession squabble
would be a blow to national pride and might have harmful economic consequences in
some cases as well.
==========
2018 20:47:13
The rest of the economy was highly regulated through the state’s control over
credit and its ability to reward or punish private companies through the granting
of subsidies, licenses, and protection from foreign competition.
==========
2018 20:50:50
the government set standards by which a company would be considered a general

trading company (on the model of the Japanese GTCs) based on a certain minimum
level of paid-in capital, exports, overseas branches, and so on. Once qualified, a
company would have preferential access to credit, markets, and licenses.
==========
2018 20:51:30
Park Chung Hee believed not only in the need for Korean “millionaires” but also in
the need for a strong state to control their behavior.
==========
2018 20:58:40
One would surmise that the army was particularly important as a socializing force
in the early phases of industrialization, when peasants were first coming off the
farm into an urban industrial workplace. Finally, in
==========
2018 20:58:43
in the early phases of industrialization, when peasants were first coming off
==========
2018 20:58:49
in the early phases of industrialization, when peasants were first coming off the
farm into an urban industrial workplace.
==========
2018 21:00:52
After the Korean War, Korea’s vital strategic tie with the United States proved a
gateway for American cultural, and hence religious, influence.
==========
2018 21:01:51
It may be that both Protestant and Confucian cultures promote similar kinds of
economic and entrepreneurial values, so that the role of the former is much more
difficult to discern
==========
2018 21:01:55
It may be that both Protestant and Confucian cultures promote similar kinds of
economic and entrepreneurial values, so that the role of the former is much more
difficult to discern in Korea than in, say, Latin America.
==========
2018 21:04:50
Park Chung Hee, for all his faults, led a disciplined and spartan personal
lifestyle and had a clear vision of where he wanted the country to go economically.
He played favorites and tolerated a considerable degree of corruption, but all
within reasonable bounds by the standards of other developing countries. He did not
waste money personally and kept the business elite from putting their resources
into Swiss villas and long vacations on the Riviera.71 Park was a dictator who
established a nasty authoritarian political system, but as an economic leader he
did much better. The same power over the economy in different hands could have led
to disaster.
==========
2018 21:14:27
The result for Korea thus far has not been propitious; while losing the election to
Kim Young Sam, the seventy-seven-year-old Chung was jailed in late 1993 on rather
specious corruption charges—a warning to all would-be politicians among the
business class that their participation in politics would not be welcome.
==========
21:54:48
Peter Buck
==========
22:13:40
Red skies at sunrise and sunset indicate humidity in the air. A halo around the
moon foreshadows rain, for
==========
22:13:43
Red skies at sunrise and sunset indicate humidity in the air.

==========
- Your Highlight on page 48 | location 733-733 | Added on Tuesday, 16 January 2018
00:08:16
reminds us, too, of the need always to be skeptical about the tenacious grip of
academic orthodoxy.
==========
00:14:44
possible, the very nature of their thoughts. This demanded, by definition, a

willingness to step back from the constraints
==========
00:14:54
This demanded, by definition, a willingness to step back from the constraints

==========
00:14:58
This demanded, by definition, a willingness to step back from the constraints of

one’s own prejudices and preconceptions.
==========
09:08:39
How long they would stay would depend on the wind. Time meant little. Wealth was
not defined as ownership, but by the prestige and status that came to one who gave
well and thus secured a social network, a sort of human capital of culture, a
treasury of ritual debts and obligations that would yield interest to one’s clan
and family forever.
==========
2018 09:11:09
the countries under discussion in Part I. State building refers to the creation of
tangible institutions—armies, police, bureaucracies, ministries, and the like. It
is accomplished by hiring staff, training officials, giving them offices, providing
them with budgets, and passing laws and directives. Nation building, by contrast,
is the creation of a sense of national identity to which individuals will be loyal,
an identity that will supersede their loyalty to tribes, villages, regions, or
ethnic groups.
==========
2018 09:11:31
no direct access to political power.

==========
2018 09:13:56
Much of what passes for corruption is not simply a matter of greed but rather the
by-product of legislators or public officials who feel more obligated to family,
tribe, region, or ethnic group than to the national community and therefore divert
money in that direction. They are not necessarily immoral people, but their circle
of moral obligation is smaller than that of the polity for which they work.
==========
2018 09:14:36
a strong sense of national identity is a necessary component of state building, it

is also for that reason dangerous. National identity is often built around
principles of ethnicity, race, religion, or language, principles that necessarily
include certain people and exclude others.
==========
2018 09:16:11
first major expression in the French Revolution. It is based on the view that the
political boundaries of the state ought to correspond to a cultural boundary, one
defined primarily by shared language and culture.
==========
2018 09:16:14
first major expression in the French Revolution. It is based on the view that the
political boundaries of the state ought to correspond to a cultural boundary, one
defined primarily by shared language and culture.
==========
2018 09:16:20
Nationalism
==========
2018 09:16:23
It is based on the view that the political boundaries of the state ought to
correspond to a cultural boundary, one defined primarily by shared language and
culture.
==========
2018 09:17:48
Charles Taylor, following Hegel, points out that struggles over identity are
inherently political because they involve demands for recognition.
==========
2018 09:18:04
Human beings are not satisfied, pace the economists, by material resources alone.
They demand as well that their authentic selves be publicly recognized—granted
dignity and equal status—by other people.
==========
2018 09:18:19
This is why for nationalists the symbols of recognition—a flag, a seat in the
United Nations, or legal status as a member of the community of nations—are of
critical importance.
==========
2018 09:20:16
agrarian societies, a person’s important life choices—where to live, what to do for

a living, what religion to practice, whom to marry—were mostly determined by the
surrounding tribe, village, or caste.
==========
2018 09:20:18

==========
2018 09:20:21

==========
2018 09:20:26
and froze it further through religious sanction. In agrarian societies, a person’s

important life choices—where to live, what to do for a living, what religion to
practice, whom to marry—were mostly determined by the surrounding tribe, village,
or caste.
==========
2018 09:20:32
In agrarian societies, a person’s important life choices—where to live, what to do

for a living, what religion to practice, whom to marry—were mostly determined by
the surrounding tribe, village, or caste.
==========
2018 09:20:52
all this begins to change with the emergence of commercial capitalism

==========
2018 09:22:31
By reading, people who had never left the confines of their little village could
all of a sudden perceive a connection to other people in other isolated villages.
Well
==========
2018 09:22:35
Well
==========
2018 09:22:38
==========
2018 09:26:49
The fixed, intimate, and limited social world that was defined by the peasant
village is replaced by the large, anonymous, and diverse world of the modern city.
==========
2018 09:27:26
Now that I’m no longer living under the thumb of my family and friends back in the
village, I have a much greater degree of choice over my own life course. “Who am
I?” has all of a sudden become a real and pressing question. This shift is
experienced as a crisis or trauma and produces a condition that Émile Durkheim
labeled anomie, or normlessness. Durkheim saw anomie manifest in higher suicide
rates in modernizing societies, but it also finds expression in higher rates of
crime and family breakdown that are often associated with rapid social change.
==========
2018 09:30:31
German speakers under a single sovereignty. In India, Kenya, and Burma, nationalism
could not be built around language, since these were ethnolinguistically fragmented
societies with no dominant group that could unite the whole country around its
culture.
==========
2018 09:31:03
Indeed, in many countries the language of the colonizer remained the lingua franca
because, first, it was regarded as a more neutral choice than any of the languages
of the ethnic subgroups, and second, it connected the former colony to the wider
global economy better than any indigenous language.
==========
2018 10:46:38
Another school influenced by economics argues that identities are essentially

coordinating mechanisms used by political entrepreneurs to promote underlying
economic interests.
==========
2018 10:51:59
some observers pointed out at the time, the stability of modern Western Europe was
built on ethnic cleansings that had taken place in earlier historical periods,
which modern
==========
2018 10:52:04
some observers pointed out at the time, the stability of modern Western Europe was
built on ethnic cleansings that had taken place in earlier historical periods,
which modern Europeans had conveniently forgotten.
==========
2018 10:52:25
Assimilation can happen voluntarily, as minorities decide that it is in their self-

interest to conform to the dominant culture.
==========
2018 10:52:41
in the United States learned English and took on American customs because that was
a route to upward social mobility.
==========
2018 10:53:49
The major exceptions are the Muslim Uighurs in the western province of Xinjiang,
the Mongols in Inner Mongolia, and the Tibetans. Assimilation continues
relentlessly as a matter of government policy, with the settling of ethnic Han
Chinese in each of these areas.
==========
2018 10:54:05
But the literary language was unified from the time of the original Qin Dynasty and
served as the basis of a common elite culture for the entire empire.
==========
2018 10:54:35
The primary instrument of cultural assimilation is the public education system and
secondarily the choice of language in public administration. Control over the
school system is thus a hugely contested issue and the central objective of would-
be nation builders.
==========
2018 10:59:11
Identity-building projects are extremely contentious because the world never

consisted of compact, homogeneous “nations” ready to be turned into political
units.
==========
2018 10:59:26
classes, religions, and regional identities. Any idea of a nation inevitably

implies the conversion or exclusion of individuals deemed to be outside its
boundaries, and if they don’t want to do this peacefully, they have to be
==========
2018 10:59:32
Any idea of a nation inevitably implies the conversion or exclusion of individuals

deemed to be outside its boundaries, and if they don’t want to do this peacefully,
they have to be
==========
2018 10:59:34

deemed to be outside its boundaries, and if they don’t want to
==========
2018 10:59:44

deemed to be outside its boundaries, and if they don’t want to do this peacefully,
they have to be coerced.
==========
2018 11:01:02
Ernest Renan, one of the first writers to describe the phenomenon of modern
nationalism, speaks of a historical amnesia that accompanied the process of nation
building.
==========
2018 11:05:04
building and modernization of the public sector. The purpose of this part of the
book has been to explain why some developed countries managed to enter the twenty-
first century with reasonably effective and uncorrupt governments, while others
continue to be plagued by clientelism, corruption, poor performance, and low levels
of trust both in government and in society more broadly.
==========
2018 11:05:29
All modern societies began with what Weber called patrimonial states, governments
that were staffed with the friends and family of the ruler, or those of the elites
who dominated the society.
==========
2018 11:06:59
These elite groups are much better organized than others in the society—
particularly dispersed and poverty-stricken peasants in agrarian societies—and have
better access to weapons and training in the use of violence.
==========
2018 11:07:58
Military competition creates imperatives far more powerful than any economic
incentive: nothing is worth very much, after all, if I and my entire family are
likely to be slaughtered at the end of a war.
==========
2018 11:08:03
on meritocratic recruitment; it necessitates new

==========
2018 11:08:14
The need to create an army puts a premium on meritocratic recruitment; it

necessitates new taxes and revenue-raising capacity; it requires bureaucratic
organization both to tax and to manage the fiscal and logistics chain that supplies
the troops in the field; and it upsets interelite relationships by forcing the
recruitment of nonelites to serve in and often lead the army.
==========
2018 11:10:35
The second route to state modernization was via a process of peaceful political
reform, based on the formation of a coalition of social groups interested in having
an efficient, uncorrupt government.
==========
2018 11:10:50
Industrialization leads to urbanization, requirements for higher levels of

education, occupational specialization, and a host of other changes that produce
new social actors not present in an agrarian society.
==========
2018 11:24:38
clientelism as the trading of votes and political support for individual benefits
rather than programmatic policies, and distinguished it from elite patronage
systems in which the scope of clientelist recruitment is far more limited and less
well organized. Clientelism appears when democracy arrives before a modern state
has had time to consolidate into an autonomous institution with its own supporting
political coalition. Clientelism is an efficient form of political mobilization in
societies with low levels of income and education, and is therefore best understood
as an early form of democracy.
==========
2018 11:28:14
principle of democracy is popular participation. These two principles can be made

to work together, but there
==========
2018 11:39:11
toward political modernization (see Figure 9). The United States inherited from
Britain a strong rule of law in the form of the Common Law,
==========
2018 13:16:55
it was easier to guarantee peace and stability by making use of local elites and
their chains of clients.
==========
2018 13:24:59
coreligionists
==========
2018 13:26:04
country; they attempted a crash modernization of

==========
2018 13:28:07
is impossible to create social movements if people cannot be motivated to join

civil society organizations, and they will not be inspired unless there is some
ideal of civic responsibility to a larger community present among their fellow
citizens.
==========
2018 13:30:55
The Progressive Era reforms in the United States eliminated one particular form of
clientelism, the ability of the political parties to secure support through the
distribution of jobs in the bureaucracy at federal, state, and local levels.
==========
2018 13:31:07
One of the big issues afflicting American politics in recent years has been the
impact of interest groups that are able to effectively buy politicians with
campaign contributions and lobbying.
==========
2018 13:31:18
so in a sense the United States has created a new form of clientelism, only
practiced at a much larger scale and with huge sums of money at stake.
==========
2018 13:33:23
In many of these cases, high-quality government was the result of a direct colonial
inheritance (Norway became independent of Denmark in 1813, Iceland in 1874, and
Canada separated from Britain in 1867). In others, it was due to a deliberate
copying of other models.
==========
2018 13:34:11
Africa, with its irrational colonial era state boundaries, had not been allowed to
sort itself out in a similar manner. The states there created neither strong
bureaucracies nor overarching national identities. Apart from the fact that
==========
2018 13:34:14
bureaucracies
==========
2018 13:34:17
bureaucracies nor overarching national identities.
==========
2018 13:35:42
Samuel Huntington in Political Order in Changing Societies—that societies needed

order before they needed democracy, and that they were better off making an
authoritarian transition to a fully modernized political and economic system rather
than trying to jump directly to democracy.
==========
2018 13:39:33
Progressive Era is singularly important. No country today can realistically try to

imitate Prussia, building a strong state through a century and a half of military
struggle. On the other hand, it is possible to imagine civil society
==========
2018 13:39:37
The Arab Spring of 2011 is just the latest demonstration of the power of the idea
of democracy, in a part of the world where many assumed there was a cultural
acceptance of dictatorship.
==========
2018 13:41:18
The structure of a modern state may be specified by certain formal rules (for
example, selection of officials based on merit rather than connections), but
implementation of these rules inevitably hurts the interests of some entrenched
political actors who benefit from the status quo.
==========
2018 13:41:26
Reform therefore requires dislodging these actors, working around them, and
organizing new social forces that will benefit from a cleaner and more capable form
of government.
==========
2018 13:44:59
Don’t businesses based on strong family ties and unstated moral obligations
degenerate into nepotism, cronyism, and generally bad business decision making?
==========
2018 13:45:49
ethical habits if they are to work properly. Contracts

==========
2018 13:45:53
Contracts allow strangers with no basis for trust to work with one another, but the
process works far more efficiently when the trust exists.
==========
2018 13:47:44
In Japan, Germany, and the United States, powerful, cohesive, large-scale

organizations have developed spontaneously primarily out of the private sector.
==========
2018 13:49:14
Japan’s stem from family structure and the nature of Japanese feudalism; Germany’s
is related to the survival of traditional communal organizations like the guilds
into the twentieth century; and that in the United States is the product of its
sectarian Protestant religious heritage.
==========
2018 13:49:48
transaction costs,
==========
2018 13:50:11
Each of these transactions is made easier if the parties believe in each other’s
basic honesty: there is less need to spell things out in lengthy contracts; less
need to hedge against unexpected contingencies; fewer disputes, and less need to
litigate if disputes arise. Indeed, in some high-trust relationships, parties do
not even have to worry about maximizing profits in the short run, because they know
that a deficit in one period will be made good by the other party later.
==========
2018 13:50:52
Unfortunately this is not a commodity which can be bought very easily. If you have
to buy it, you already have some doubts about what you’ve bought.
==========
2018 13:52:42
perhaps by stationing someone at the door to make sure customers did not leave
before they paid or by demanding a cash deposit in advance. The fact that they
typically do not do so indicates that a certain basic level of honesty, practiced
as a matter of habit rather than rational calculation, is fairly widespread
throughout the society.
==========
2018 13:56:47
In general, the more demanding the values of the community’s ethical system are and
the higher are the qualifications for entry into the community, the greater is the
degree of solidarity and mutual trust among those on the inside.
==========
2018 11:44:29
Commando units and religious sects are examples of organizations in which

individuals will be self-motivated to advance the group’s interests ahead of their
own.
==========
2018 11:44:52
This is perhaps one reason that Weber’s early Puritan entrepreneurs, or recent
converts to Protestantism in Latin America, do so well: it is much harder to be a
free rider when God (rather than, say, an accountant) is watching.
==========
2018 11:45:05
good managers learn to instill a certain sense of pride in their employees, a

belief that they are part of something much larger than themselves. People feel
better motivated to do their share
==========
2018 11:45:14
good managers learn to instill a certain sense of pride in their employees, a

belief that they are part of something much larger than themselves.
==========
2018 11:46:24
subordinate is not good for organizations. There are many groups exhibiting a high
degree of solidarity that are highly inefficient from
==========
2018 11:46:30
There are many groups exhibiting a high degree of solidarity that are highly
inefficient from the standpoint of the economic welfare of the society as a whole.
==========
2018 11:48:15
Contemporary cartels include not just oil producers and suppliers of gold and
diamonds but professional associations like the American Medical Association or the
National Educational Association, which set standards for entry into the medical
and teaching professions, respectively, or labor unions that regulate the entry of
new workers into the labor market.
==========
2018 11:49:38
the early phases of the industrial revolution, new enterprises had to be located
outside the towns so as to escape the restrictions imposed by the guilds—an ironic
upending of the aphorism Stadtluft macht frei (“city air liberates”).
==========
2018 11:50:35
Mancur Olson has formulated a theory that maintains that economic stagnation can be
traced to the growing proliferation of interest groups that occurs in stable
democratic societies.
==========
2018 11:52:41
Britain experienced continuous social peace in a way that permitted the steady
accretion of efficiency-destroying groups.
==========
2018 11:54:38
China and Italy look highly communitarian when viewed from within the family but
rather individualistic when one observes the rather low level
==========
2018 12:56:31
trade union membership in Britain than America, a fact that has led some to argue
that Britain is a less individualistic, more communally oriented society than the
United States.15
==========
2018 12:56:36
There has been a consistently higher level of trade union membership in Britain
than America, a fact that has led some to argue that Britain is a less
individualistic, more communally oriented society than the United States.15
==========
2018 12:57:30
Japanese workers tend to identify with their companies rather than with their
fellow workers; because they are company unions, Japanese trade unions are despised
by their more militant brethren abroad.
==========
2018 12:59:07
In Schumpeter’s phrase, capitalism is a process of “creative destruction,” in which

older, economically harmful or inefficient organizations have to be modified or
eliminated and new ones created in their place. Economic progress demands the
constant substitution of one kind of group for the other.
==========
2018 14:31:35
As a percentage of total industrial employment, Japanese firms are the least

concentrated of the entire group, and particularly so when compared to the smaller
European countries like Holland, Switzerland, and Sweden.
==========
2018 22:34:46
waterfalls. Each river welcomed a different canoe, and in each drainage the
==========
2018 23:36:49
Joseph Conrad described the jungle as less a forest than a primeval mob, a remnant
of an ancient era when vegetation rioted and consumed the world.
==========
2018 00:24:23
For the Indians of the Vaupés, rivers are not just routes of communication, they
are
==========
2018 00:24:46
For the Indians of the Vaupés, rivers are not just routes of communication, they
are the veins of the earth, the link between the living and the dead, the paths
along which the ancestors travelled at the beginning of time.
==========
2018 00:27:20
To learn, one listens without speaking until the language is mastered.

==========
2018 00:29:59
left me with only a superficial sense of the place, and a sad feeling that with the
influence of the missionaries, an extraordinary culture was destined to be lost.
This was the familiar lament of anthropologists of the day. Wherever we went, we
encountered what we assumed to be disappearing worlds.
==========
11:29:03
left me with only a superficial sense of the place, and a sad feeling that with the
influence of the missionaries, an extraordinary culture was destined to be lost.
This was the familiar lament of anthropologists of the day. Wherever we went, we
encountered what we assumed to be disappearing worlds.
==========
2018 11:38:23
The paltry 4 percent of Nigerian exports not related to energy is testimony to the
complete failure to create either a modern commercial agriculture industry or
manufacturing sector, which would have been sustainable routes to economic
development.4
==========
2018 11:38:51
Unlike the East Asian export-led economies, this money was not plowed back into
investments in either physical or human capital (that is, education). Nor did it
have much of an effect on the incomes of ordinary Nigerians: indeed, poverty rates
increased dramatically, and other indicators of development, such as child
mortality rates, barely budged.
==========
2018 11:40:07
Politics is the general route to riches in Nigeria; very little income has been
earned through entrepreneurship and genuine value creation.
==========
2018 11:41:24
Reflecting Nigeria’s weak protection of property rights, middle-class Nigerians

often paint large signs on their houses stating that they are not for sale. The
reason for this is that they could go away on a vacation and return to find their
house occupied by a stranger who had stolen the legal title from them.
==========
2018 11:44:01
Boko Haram’s violent tactics can in no way be justified by northern Nigeria’s

poverty, but it and other dissident groups find the country’s corrupt government an
easy target for their activities due to its extraordinarily weak legitimacy.
==========
2018 12:21:38
are members of clientelistic networks. Elections are hotly, violently, and often
fraudulently contested because there is so much at stake in terms of access to
state resources.
==========
2018 12:21:42
Elections are hotly, violently, and often fraudulently contested because there is
so much at stake in terms of access to state resources.
==========
2018 12:24:44
The Nigerian state is weak not only in technical capacity and its ability to
enforce laws impersonally and transparently. It is also weak in a moral sense: it
has a deficit of legitimacy.
==========
2018 12:25:07
The country’s complex electoral laws require that a president be elected not just
by a plurality of votes in a national election, but that he or she receive a
certain number of votes in different regions of the country.
==========
2018 12:25:22
This clever rule effectively makes it difficult for a candidate representing one
region or ethnic group to dominate the system as a whole. But it does not guarantee
that Nigerians will feel a common sense of national identity, or that they will
trust the president and other national leaders to treat their group fairly.
==========
2018 12:39:50
Books XIV–XIX of his great work The Spirit of the Laws contain an extensive
discussion of the impact of climate and geography on political institutions.
==========
2018 12:40:29
everything, being in a state of total incapacity. The inhabitants

==========
2018 12:40:37
The inhabitants of warm countries are, like old men, timorous … the people in cold
countries are, like young men, brave.
==========
2018 12:42:02
Montesquieu goes on to note that “in cold countries they have very little
sensibility for pleasure; in temperate countries, they have more; in warm
countries, their sensibility is exquisite.”
==========
2018 12:44:19
By the second half of the twentieth century, however, when the European colonial
empires were being disbanded and countries of the developing world were emerging as
independent states, this line of reasoning began to fall out of favor.
==========
2018 13:12:04
Europeans justified their conquests of much of the rest of the world on the basis
of a social Darwinist doctrine regarding their own inherent racial superiority.
==========
2018 13:13:03
The peoples being colonized were regarded as unfit for democracy or self-rule
because they were lower down on an evolutionary scale and would require centuries
of tutelage before they were ready
==========
2018 13:13:08
The peoples being colonized were regarded as unfit for democracy or self-rule
because they were lower down on an evolutionary scale and would require centuries
of tutelage before they were ready to operate modern institutions on their own.
==========
2018 21:14:50
In recent years there has been a revival of arguments that climate and geography
are the chief determinants of both modern institutions and economic growth.
==========
2018 21:15:02
economists, for whom materialistic explanations of behavior are second nature.

==========
2018 21:20:09
hot southern climates directly affect economic performance not by making people
lazy and pleasure loving but by debilitating them with chronic diseases that hinder
their ability to work and flourish.
==========
2018 22:42:22
It was England that seeded North America and gave it the institutions of Common Law
and parliamentary government, while South America was colonized by a mercantilist
and absolutist Spain or Portugal.
==========
2018 22:45:14
factor endowments,
==========
2018 22:56:47
political clout to preserve their initial advantage. Thus the Creole elites in
Latin America were able in later years to block immigration into their societies,
so as to prevent competition in labor markets.
==========
2018 22:56:53
Thus the Creole elites in Latin America were able in later years to block
immigration into their societies, so as to prevent competition in labor markets.
==========
2018 22:59:02
The economists Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Simon Johnson modify this
argument in an often-cited paper, arguing that the variation in early institutions
was due not to factor endowments so much as early settler mortality, which was
driven in turn by the diseases to which they were subject.
==========
2018 22:59:29
Where disease made it too costly to settle, the colonial powers set up what they
labeled “extractive” economic institutions enforced by “absolutist” political
structures.
==========
2018 23:02:42
older wealthy regions with dense populations attracted European colonists, who
enslaved those populations and created extractive institutions. Those institutions
then served to block the development of more open, competitive market economies
that were necessary for industrial development.
==========
2018 23:02:49
By contrast, poor, sparsely settled regions were not burdened with the legacy of
bad institutions and permitted more inclusive ones to appear.
==========
2018 00:22:56
Nonetheless, all the writers in this tradition agree that economic factors such as
geography, climate, diseases, the availability of resources like labor, precious
metals, rainfall levels, and the feasibility of plantation agriculture are the
final determinants of the nature of institutions.
==========
2018 00:25:05
people from running away from state authority. Tribal societies are egalitarian and
can subsist over very large ranges of territory. States by contrast are coercive
and typically need to compel the obedience of their citizens.
==========
2018 00:25:09
Tribal societies are egalitarian and can subsist over very large ranges of
territory. States by contrast are coercive and typically need to compel the
obedience of their citizens.
==========
2018 00:48:34
the literature on colonialism gives too much weight to colonial legacies in

general. Contemporary institutional outcomes, and thus contemporary growth
outcomes, were influenced not just by the policies of the colonial powers but also
by the nature of preexisting indigenous institutions.
==========
2018 00:48:47
the superior performance of East Asia in modern times is directly related to the
fact that many East Asian countries developed strong, modern states prior to their
contact with the West.
==========
2018 01:18:22
His presence turned the journey into an ongoing tutorial of spirit and culture, an
endless series of revelations that each day brought a deeper understanding of a
subtle philosophy that was dazzling in its sophistication and profoundly hopeful in
its implications.
==========
2018 14:16:18
They established colonies because they wanted to get rich, and for this purpose
they were attracted to the regions that were already wealthy and populous, such as
the seats of the Aztec and Inca Empires in Mexico and Peru.
==========
2018 14:16:53
The Spanish located their two viceroyalties in Mexico and Peru precisely because
they found precious gold and silver there and because they could draw on dense
populations as sources of servile labor.
==========
2018 14:21:26
Sugar differs from staple crops like wheat or corn because it is not suitable for
family farming. Families cannot live on sugar; it is purely an export crop.
==========
2018 14:23:04
it was relatively easy to transport slaves to the new colony being established in
Brazil, where prevailing winds made for a much easier east-to-west journey than
farther north in the Atlantic where prevailing winds blew in the opposite
direction. Under the harsh work conditions of sugar production in the tropics,
slave populations did not reproduce themselves sufficiently, so a triangular trade
developed: slaves were exported to Brazil, sugar and sugar products like rum were
exported back to Europe, and European manufactured goods were sent to Africa in
return for more slaves.
==========
2018 14:23:12
farther north in the Atlantic where
==========
2018 14:23:18
farther north in the Atlantic where prevailing winds blew in the opposite
direction.
==========
2018 14:23:52
triangular trade developed: slaves were exported to Brazil, sugar and sugar
products like rum were exported back to Europe, and European manufactured goods
were sent to Africa in return for more slaves. Thus Brazil, now a charter
==========
2018 14:24:08
triangular trade developed: slaves were exported to Brazil, sugar and sugar
products like rum were exported back to Europe, and European manufactured goods
were sent to Africa in return for more slaves.
==========
2018 14:31:56
number of Marxist historians have argued that the Civil War itself was driven not
by moral considerations concerning slavery but rather by a competition between free
and servile forms of labor.
==========
2018 14:35:55
Diamond attributes this success to a number of technological factors, such as the

Spanish use of horses, muskets, and steel swords, none of which were possessed by
the Incas, as well as a healthy dose of tactical surprise. The Spanish brought with
them Old World diseases, as is well known, which devastated native populations and
eventually killed as many as 90 percent of the local inhabitants.
==========
2018 14:37:54
The country was unified under the Qin and Earlier Han Dynasties, the first taking
power in 221 B.C., the latter in 202 B.C. At the time of the Qin-Han unification,
China consisted not just of the remnants of the seven early warring states but also
of pockets of tribal and aristocratic influence spread throughout the country. It
took the Han bureaucracy, modeled on that of the western state of Qin, nearly two
hundred years to fully suppress these pockets of resistance and create a uniform,
modern administrative system that ruled over a population as large as the
contemporaneous Roman Empire.
==========
2018 00:21:23
The Mauryas succeeded in violently unifying the northern two-thirds of the

subcontinent under Ashoka, but their empire went into decline within three
generations because they were never able to create a powerful administrative
system.
==========
2018 00:28:03
Mercantilism, as Adam Smith was to demonstrate in The Wealth of Nations, created

huge inefficiencies and was highly detrimental to economic growth. It also had very
significant political consequences: access to markets and the right to make
productive economic investments were limited to individuals or corporations favored
by the state. This meant that the route to personal wealth lay through the state
and through gaining political influence.
==========
2018 00:30:15
This problem was crystallized in the saying “Obedézcase, pero no se cumpla” (Obey,
but do not comply).
==========
- Your Note on page 287 | location 4397 | Added on Sunday, 21 January 2018 00:30:46
maybe this is like the sytem in Nepal .

==========
2018 00:32:40
the first centuries of colonial rule, there was no Spanish Hobbes or Locke to tell
the settlers that they possessed natural and universal rights as human beings.
==========
2018 19:33:15
growth. The two phenomena of unstable politics and poor long-term economic
performance are closely related to the underlying problem of inequality.
==========
2018 19:33:18
The two phenomena of unstable politics and poor long-term economic performance are
closely related to the underlying problem of inequality.
==========
2018 19:37:27
Climate and geography were among the original sources of the Latin American birth
defect.
==========
2018 19:38:54
This meant that the emergence of formal democracy in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries did not necessarily lead to empowerment of ordinary people but rather to
the continued indirect elite domination of democratic political
==========
2018 19:39:04
This meant that the emergence of formal democracy in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries did not necessarily lead to empowerment of ordinary people but rather to
the continued indirect elite domination of democratic political systems that
maintained the social status quo.
==========
2018 19:41:21
Japan is, of course, a Confucian society, and shares many values with China, from
which much of Japanese culture was adopted.
==========
2018 19:41:39
children owe extensive obligations to their parents that do not exist in Western
cultures.
==========
2018 19:44:42
Japan’s “promiscuous” adoption practices as “barbarous” and “lawless” because of

their openness to strangers.
==========
2018 22:42:56
The differences between Chinese and Japanese families are evident in naming
conventions. There are many more surnames in Japan than in China, just as there are
more Chinese than Korean surnames. The relatively small number of surnames in China
is testimony to the inclusiveness of family and lineage organizations. Chinese
family names are very old, and many have been in use for over two thousand years.
It is not uncommon, after the passage of a long period of time, for all residents
in a village to have the same last name. Families will seek out long-lost distaff
branches and try to reincorporate them into the main line, and offshoots with only
distant connections to a prominent lineage will try to prove close affinity.
==========
2018 22:50:09
Although entry into the relationship was voluntary, exit was not; the moral
commitment of mutual obligation lasted an entire lifetime and took on the character
of a religious vow.
==========
2018 22:50:42
when viewed from a Chinese perspective. Chie Nakane

==========
2018 22:50:48
when viewed from a Chinese perspective. Chie Nakane reports that “even in pre-war
times the behaviour of Japanese children toward their parents often surprised
Chinese who visited Japan, because of the lack of respect toward parents as
measured by Chinese standards.”
==========
2018 22:50:52
Chie Nakane reports that “even in pre-war times the behaviour of Japanese children
toward their parents often surprised Chinese who visited Japan, because of the lack
of respect toward parents as measured by Chinese standards.”
==========
2018 22:52:11
The anthropologist Francis Hsu argues that iemoto-like groups are characteristic
not only of the traditional arts and crafts, with which they are commonly
==========
2018 22:52:20
The anthropologist Francis Hsu argues that iemoto-like groups are characteristic
not only of the traditional arts and crafts, with which they are commonly
associated, but constitute the structure of virtually all organizations in Japan,
including business organizations.26 Japanese political parties, for example, are
divided up into quasi-permanent factions led by a senior member of the party.
==========
2018 22:55:23
contrast to China, where people visit whatever temples or shrines they please, most
Japanese “belong” to a temple the way that Americans “belong” to a particular
church, supporting it with charitable donations and developing a personal
relationship
==========
2018 22:55:33
contrast to China, where people visit whatever temples or shrines they please, most
Japanese “belong” to a temple the way that Americans “belong” to a particular
church, supporting it with charitable donations and developing a personal
relationship with the monk or abbot in charge.
==========
2018 22:56:57
This form of social organization creates habits that are carried into the business
world: while Japanese firms are frequently said to be “family-like,” Chinese
companies are literally families.
==========
2018 23:07:04
Confucian doctrine supports a number of different virtues, and the relative

emphasis that these virtues receive can have important implications for real-world
social relationships.
==========
2018 23:08:07
addition, the meaning of loyalty changed subtly from its Chinese version. In China,
there was an ethical sense that one had duties to oneself, that is, personal
standards of behavior to which one had to conform that served as the functional
equivalent of a Western individual conscience.
==========
2018 23:08:48
We have seen how in traditional China, when a father breaks the law, the son is
usually not obligated to inform the police or other authorities. Ties to family
trump ties to political authorities, even the authority of the emperor. In Japan,
by contrast, a son in a similar dilemma would have a duty to report his father to
the police: loyalty to the daimyo trumps loyalty to the family.
==========
2018 23:09:35
The Japanese altered the Confucian teachings they imported from China to suit their
own political circumstances. In China, even the emperor’s authority was not
absolute; it could be undermined altogether if he lost the “mandate of heaven” by
behaving immorally.
==========
2018 23:17:12
Japanese auto companies building assembly plants in the United States, for example,
have tended to bring over with them the suppliers in their network organizations
from Japan.
==========
2018 23:18:05
But by and large, the Japanese radius of trust can be fully extended only to other
Japanese.
==========
2018 23:19:20
In Japan, frequently the real holder of power is an anonymous person behind the
scenes, who is content to exercise rule indirectly.
==========
2018 23:20:49
In sharp contrast to China, where emperors often ruled, the real struggles for
leadership in Japan occurred among the emperor’s advisers, who maintained the
facade of unbroken rule and legitimacy while contesting for real power so
vigorously that the country was frequently plunged into civil war.
==========
2018 23:22:02
Like the widespread practice of adoption, the fact that real and nominal power
holders do not have to correspond in Japan has been of great advantage in both
political and business successions.
==========
2018 23:23:16
Although the Japanese respect old age, they also respect an old man who, like
Soichiro Honda, understands when his time is up and relinquishes power to someone
younger and more vigorous.
==========
2018 23:26:08
An important one concerns the special character of Japanese Buddhism. As Robert

Bellah and others have shown, the doctrines of the Buddhist monks Baigan Ishida and
Shosan Suzuki in the early Tokugawa period sanctified mundane economic activity and
promulgated a commercial ethic in a manner comparable to early Puritanism in
England, Holland, and America.
==========
2018 23:26:21
There was, in other words, the Japanese counterpart to the Protestant work ethic,
formulated at around the same time as its European version. This phenomenon is
closely related to the Zen tradition of perfectionism in everyday, secular
activities—swordsmanship, archery, carpentry, silk weaving, and the like—that comes
about through inner
==========
2018 23:26:26
There was, in other words, the Japanese counterpart to the Protestant work ethic,
formulated at around the same time as its European version. This phenomenon is
closely related to the Zen tradition of perfectionism in everyday, secular
activities—swordsmanship, archery, carpentry, silk weaving, and the like—that comes
about through inner meditation rather than explicit technique.
==========
2018 00:17:22
When I was writing down these fantasies, I once asked myself, “What am I really
doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science. But then what is it?”
Whereupon a voice within me said, “It is art.” I was astonished. It had never
entered my head that what I was writing had any connection with art. Then I
thought, “Perhaps my unconscious is forming a personality that is not me, but which
is insisting on coming through to expression.”
==========
2018 00:19:52
There is a tremendous difference between intending to tell something and actually

telling it. In order to be as honest as possible with myself, I wrote everything
down very carefully, following the old Greek maxim: “Give away all that thou hast,
then shalt thou receive.”
==========
2018 00:20:10
“It is perfectly true that I have thought and felt this way at some time or other,
but I don’t have to think and feel that way now. I need not accept this banality of
mine in perpetuity; that is an unnecessary humiliation.”
==========
2018 00:36:00
It would be unfair to continue teaching young students when my own intellectual

situation was nothing but a mass of doubts.
==========
2018 00:43:04
I was being compelled to go through this process of the unconscious. I had to let
myself be carried along by the current, without a notion of where it would lead me.
When I began drawing the mandalas, however, I saw that everything, all the paths I
had been following, all the steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point—
namely, to the mid-point.
==========
2018 00:49:27
As a young man my goal had been to accomplish something in my science. But then, I
hit upon this stream of lava, and the heat of its fires reshaped my life.
==========
11:38:16
“What distinguishes tantric from other Hindu and Buddhist teaching is its
systematic emphasis on the identity of the absolute [paramārtha] and the phenomenal
[vyavahāra] world when filtered through the experience of worship [sādhanā].”
==========
11:39:23
In what are known as the “right-handed” schools these are used in rituals
symbolically, whereas in the “left-handed” schools they are used literally.
==========
11:50:21
introversion. . . . Such introversions lead to characteristic inner processes of

personality changes. In the course of several thousand years these introversions
became gradually organized as methods, and along widely differing ways.”
==========
11:55:11
Throughout his writings on Eastern thought, while Jung promoted and endorsed their
study he cautioned against their practice by Westerners: “There are many different
kinds of yoga and Europeans often become hypnotized by it, but it is essentially
Eastern, no European has the necessary patience and it is not right for
him. . . . The more we study yoga, the more we realize how far it is from us; a
European can only imitate it and what he acquires by this is of no real
interest.”48 For Jung the danger was one of mimetic madness: “The European who
practices yoga does not know what he is doing. It has a bad effect upon him, sooner
or later he gets afraid and sometimes it even leads him over the edge of
madness.”49 This led him to conclude that “in the course of the centuries the West
will produce its own yoga, and it will be on the basis laid down by
Christianity.”50
==========
12:04:53
back—the richer for the experiences—into ourselves.

==========
12:14:14
He claimed that the profundity of Kundalini yoga was that it viewed reality as “a
balanced polarity of woman and man power.”
==========
12:15:19
One meditates upon the symbol, and appropriates its contents partly intellectually,
partly psychically, and arrives in this way at a certain kind of psychic change;
perhaps sometimes one may arrive at a stratum, in which happen the radical
developments of the soul. But not often. The danger to people who deal with the
cakras from without is that they remain in the region of these psychic
processes . . . and the real change in the inmost structure of their being would
not take place.
==========
2018 19:14:18
It is more like the moral obligation felt by members of a religious sect toward one
another, where entry into the relationship is voluntary but exit much less so. The
first manifestation of reciprocal obligation
==========
2018 19:14:22
another, where entry into the
==========
2018 19:14:28
another, where entry into the relationship is voluntary but exit much less so.
==========
2018 19:16:35
The penalties for violating the informal contract can be severe: an employee who
leaves a lifetime employment firm for another because it pays better may
subsequently be ostracized, as will a company that tries to raid employees of
another firm.
==========
2018 19:16:40
The penalties for violating the informal contract can be severe: an employee who
leaves a lifetime employment firm for another because it pays better may
subsequently be ostracized, as will a company that tries to raid employees of
another firm. Enforcement of these sanctions rests not on law but on moral pressure
alone.
==========
2018 19:19:54
Japanese companies pay a relatively larger share of total compensation to their

workers in the form of bonuses. Some bonuses are granted as a reward for individual
effort, but more often they are paid to larger groups—say, a section within a
company or the company as a whole—in return for its collective efforts. A worker,
in other words, knows that he will not be fired except in cases of extreme
misbehavior, and he also knows that his compensation will rise only as a result of
getting older, and not in return for increased individual effort on his part. If
the worker proves incompetent or unfit in some other way, the company, rather than
firing him, will often find some part of the enterprise where he can be safely
tucked away. From the standpoint of management, labor becomes a large fixed cost
that can be reduced only with great difficulty in times of economic downturn.
==========
2018 19:20:49
The employee, in other words, wants to do his best for the company because it looks
after his long-term welfare. The sense of obligation is not formal or
==========
2018 19:20:54
The employee, in other words, wants to do his best for the company because it looks
after his long-term welfare.
==========
2018 19:21:53
Communist states tried to inculcate a similar sense of moral obligation to the

larger social group through constant propaganda, indoctrination, and intimidation.
==========
2018 19:22:03
Communist states tried to inculcate a similar sense of moral obligation to the

larger social group through constant propaganda, indoctrination, and intimidation.
This kind of ideological hectoring not only proved ineffective in motivating people
to work but promoted a widespread cynicism, which, since the fall of communism, has
resulted in a pronounced lack of work values, public-spiritedness, and citizenship
in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
==========
2018 19:22:16
Employees in the lifetime employment system resist free riding in part because
moral obligation is a two-way street. Their loyalty and work are repaid in a
variety of ways that go well beyond the commitment to job security.
==========
2018 19:22:41
And he is much more likely to socialize after hours with the people under his
supervision. Japanese companies typically organize
==========
2018 19:22:45
And he is much more likely to socialize after hours with the people under his
supervision.
==========
2018 19:23:03
The Japanese corporation is frequently described as family-like.10 The assertion

that “a good foreman looks at his workers as a father does his children” usually
elicits strong assent in Japanese opinion surveys.
==========
2018 19:35:11
Knowledge is power, and many Western unions have had the unhappy experience of
being outmaneuvered by employers willing to cook the books, overstating costs and
understating profits, for bargaining purposes.
==========
2018 19:35:35
Japanese unions, then, can come into existence only as the counterpart of Japanese
management.
==========
2018 19:39:07
Lifetime employment in its current form does not date back further than the end of
World War II and in any case does not apply to many small companies in the second
tier of Japanese industry.
==========
2018 19:41:34
There was in fact a tradition dating back to Tokugawa times of highly mobile
artisans, who moved from workplace to workplace as the mood struck them. These
workers took pride in their intolerance of routine, in their rebelliousness, in
their ability to sell their labor where they chose, and in their high living and
frequently unconventional lifestyles, all characteristics we tend not to associate
with contemporary Japanese.
==========
2018 12:24:29
third unique characteristic is that network members tend to trade with each other
on a preferential basis, even when that does not make strict economic sense.
Keiretsu members do not trade exclusively with one another, but they do tend to
trade more heavily with other group members than with outside companies, frequently
paying higher prices or receiving goods of lower quantity than would be the case
were these pure market transactions.
==========
2018 12:24:32
==========
2018 12:24:34
==========
2018 12:24:41
A third unique characteristic is that network members tend to trade with each other
==========
2018 12:27:29
Japanese prime contractors, by contrast, frequently demand that they be able to

scrutinize all aspects of a subcontractor’s operations for the sake of efficiency,
a demand that is accepted because the latter trusts the former not to misuse the
information gained in this manner.9
==========
2018 12:32:56
As anyone who has worked in one knows, corporations are the last bastion of
authoritarianism: the single CEO at the top has, with the leave of his board of
directors, more or less total freedom to order his organization around like an
army. At the same time, the people working within this hierarchy are supposed to
cooperate, and not compete, against each other.
==========
2018 12:35:24
Transaction costs can be substantial, in turn, because human beings are not
completely trustworthy.
==========
2018 12:35:36
In Williamson’s words, “The modern corporation is mainly to be understood as the

product of a series of organizational innovations that have had the purpose and
effect of economizing on transaction costs.”
==========
2018 12:36:46
But human beings are, in Williamson’s words, “opportunistic” and characterized by
“bounded rationality” (meaning that they do not always make optimally rational
decisions); integrated corporations are necessary because outside suppliers cannot
be relied on to do what they contract to do.
==========
2018 12:38:16
That is, large organizations suffer from diseconomies of scale: the free rider
problem becomes more severe the larger the organization becomes;15 they are prone
to agency costs, where the firm’s bureaucracy
==========
2018 12:38:20
to agency costs, where the firm’s bureaucracy
==========
2018 12:38:32
to agency costs, where the firm’s bureaucracy develops a stake in its own survival
rather than profit maximization; and they suffer from information costs when
managers lose track of what is happening in their own organizations.
==========
2018 13:40:35
Particularly important were the rules on adoption: the Japanese family could
incorporate nonbiologically related strangers into the household much more readily
than in China, a characteristic that was extremely important in paving the way for
==========
2018 13:40:40
Particularly important were the rules on adoption: the Japanese family could
incorporate nonbiologically related strangers into the household much more readily
than in China, a characteristic that was extremely important in paving the way for
professional management of family businesses.
==========
2018 11:34:02
although there is no lifetime employment system, firing a German worker remains far
more difficult than firing an American worker.
==========
2018 11:35:36
since unification at the enormous
==========
2018 11:35:42
Turkish workers possess more classically German virtues like a strong work ethic
and self-discipline than the ethnic Germans who grew up under communism.
==========
2018 11:36:04
The number of similarities between German and Japanese culture, many of which can
be traced to the highly developed sense of communal solidarity shared by both, are
intriguing, and they have been remarked upon by numerous observers. Both countries
have reputations for orderliness and discipline, reflected in clean public spaces
and tidy private homes.
==========
2018 11:36:28
These are societies whose members enjoy playing by the rules, thereby reinforcing a
sense of belonging to a distinct cultural group. Both peoples have a reputation for
going about their work with great intensity and seriousness; neither is known
either for lightness of touch or a sense of humor.
==========
2018 11:36:54
and optics industries, their Leicas and Nikons. On the other hand, their communal
solidarity within the
==========
2018 11:37:01
On the other hand, their communal solidarity within the national community weakens
their regard for people who stand outside it; neither country has been known for
its friendliness to foreigners, and both became notorious for their brutality to
the peoples they conquered and ruled.
==========
2018 11:38:33
Hence culture is not an unbending, primordial force but something shaped

continuously by the flow of politics and history.
==========
2018 11:40:55
In England, for example, large family-owned and-managed businesses survived through

the end of World War II, as they did in France and Italy.
==========
2018 11:43:13
The key difference between the German and British concerns lay in the quality of
their entrepreneurs, and in particular in tremendous organizational ability of the
leading German industrialists.
==========
2018 11:47:52
industry-wide plans for industrial restructuring. Cartel arrangements

==========
2018 11:48:01
Cartel arrangements tended to become more important in times of recession than in

times of growth; in such periods firms would agree to share markets rather than
turn on each other to drive weaker competitors out of business.
==========
2018 11:52:21
In contrast to other national labor movements, German labor unions have not taken
strongly protectionist positions to defend declining industries and generally have
behaved in ways that management would consider responsible.
==========
2018 11:52:28
There is, in short, a much higher degree of mutual trust between labor and
management in Germany than there is in less communally oriented societies.
==========
2018 11:54:33
The post-World War II “ordo-liberal” school associated with intellectuals at the

University of Freiburg, which influenced the development of the
Sozialmarktwirtschaft, opposed any kind of simple return to laissezfaire
capitalism.
==========
2018 11:55:10
The Sozialmarktwirtschaft itself was originally conceived as an attempt to find a

third way between purely market-oriented capitalism and socialism and was put into
place not by a socialist but by a Christian Democratic chancellor, Ludwig Erhard.23
==========
2018 11:58:32
Perhaps the most important achievement of the German government was to establish
first-class universal and higher education systems. That system’s technical schools
served as the underpinning of German economic prowess during the so-called second
industrial revolution in the second half of the nineteenth century that saw the
birth of the steel, chemical, and electrical industries.24 Then, during the
National Socialist period, the state took over important parts of the economy
directly, allocating credit, setting prices and wages, and engaging in
manufacturing.
==========
2018 11:59:47
noncommissioned officers (NCOs) in the German army. From well before the
democratizing reforms of the post-1945 period, NCOs in Germany have been trusted
with broader authority than their counterparts in France, Britain, or the United
States, performing functions usually reserved for commissioned officers elsewhere.
==========
2018 11:59:57
NCOs in any army tend to be less educated and come from blue-collar backgrounds;
putting them rather than a “white-collar” lieutenant in charge consequently reduces
status distinctions within the unit.
==========
2018 12:01:08
According to Max Weber and the sociological tradition that he founded, the very
essence of modern economic life is the rise and proliferation of rules and law.
==========
2018 12:01:19
tripartite division of authority into traditional, charismatic, and bureaucratic

forms.
==========
2018 12:01:55
the first, authority was inherited from long-standing cultural sources like
religion or patriarchal tradition. In the second, authority came from a “gift”; a
leader was chosen by God or some other supernatural power.1 The rise of the modern
world, however, was bound up with the rise of rationality, that is, the ordered
structuring of ends to means, and for Weber the ultimate embodiment of rationality
was modern bureaucracy.2 Modern bureaucracy was based on “the principle of fixed
and official jurisdictional areas, which are generally ordered by rules, that is,
by laws and administrative regulations.”
==========
2018 12:02:18
the ability of superiors to have their way was limited in a transparent and clearly
articulated manner, and the rights and duties of
==========
2018 12:02:25
the ability of superiors to have their way was limited in a transparent and clearly
articulated manner, and the rights and duties of subordinates were spelled out in
advance.4
==========
2018 12:04:04
Purposive contracts, on the other hand, were entered into for the sake of some
specific act of economic exchange. They did not affect broad social relationships
but were limited to the particular transaction at hand.
==========
2018 12:04:40
development of institutions like property rights, contract, and a stable system of

commercial law was critical to the rise of the West.
==========
2018 12:04:49
These legal institutions served as a substitute for the trust that existed
naturally within families and kinship groups and constituted a framework under
which strangers could interact in joint business ventures or in the marketplace.
==========
2018 12:05:40
The professional receives both a general college education and several years of
technical education in his or her specialty and is expected to display a high
degree of judgment and initiative as a matter of course. The nature of this
judgment is often complex and context dependent and therefore cannot be spelled out
in detail in advance.
==========
2018 12:46:54
professionals, once they have received their technical accreditation, can go

completely unsupervised if they are in business for themselves, or else are
relatively loosely supervised if they work in an administrative hierarchy.
==========
2018 12:47:05
professionals tend to be trusted to a higher degree than nonprofessionals and

therefore operate in a less rule-bound environment.
==========
2018 12:49:28
Workplaces would run more efficiently if all employees, and not only the most
skilled ones, behaved and were treated like professionals, with internalized
standards of behavior and judgment.
==========
2018 12:50:07
Past a certain point, the proliferation of rules to regulate wider and wider sets
of social relationships becomes not the hallmark of rational efficiency but a sign
of social dysfunction.
==========
2018 12:50:24
There is usually an inverse relationship between rules and trust: the more people
depend on rules to regulate their interactions, the less they trust each other, and
vice versa.
==========
2018 12:51:21
As Adam Smith noted, “The division of labour is limited by the extent of the
market.”
==========
2018 12:51:49
In other words, the increasingly commodity-like character of manufactured output

led to growth in the sophistication of production machinery and, in turn, a
decreasing need for skilled labor to operate that equipment.
==========
2018 12:54:38
white-collar engineering and planning departments. Worker efficiency was based on a

strict carrot-and-stick approach: productive workers were paid a higher piece rate
than less productive ones.
==========
2018 12:54:47
Worker efficiency was based on a strict carrot-and-stick approach: productive

workers were paid a higher piece rate than less productive ones.
==========
2018 12:56:11
The consequences of Taylorism for labor-management relations in the industries in

which it was implemented were both predictable and, in the long run, quite harmful.
==========
2018 12:56:31
factory organized according to Taylorite principles broadcasts to its workers the

message that they are not going to be trusted with significant responsibilities and
that their duties will be laid out for them in a highly detailed and legalistic
form.
==========
2018 12:58:57
But groups can enter into a downward spiral of distrust when trust is repaid with
what is perceived as betrayal or exploitation.
==========
2018 13:00:39
because this was not part of his job description. The unions also strongly
preferred promotion
==========
2018 13:01:01
The unions also strongly preferred promotion based on seniority rather than skill.
To promote workers on the basis of ability required trusting management to make
difficult judgment calls about individual abilities, which they were not willing to
concede.
==========
2018 13:01:11
legalization of the larger American society.19 Disputes

==========
2018 13:01:19
Disputes arising in the workplace tended not to be worked out informally through
group discussions but were referred to the legal system for resolution.
==========
2018 13:03:09
An important school of American sociologists believed that there would be a gradual

convergence on the Taylorite labor-management relations model in all advanced
societies.21 This view was shared by many of the critics of modern industrial
society from Karl Marx to Charlie Chaplin, who believed the Taylorite division of
labor was the inevitable consequence of the capitalist form of industrialization.
==========
2018 13:03:14
Under this system, man was destined to become alienated:

==========
2018 13:03:32
people would relate to each other through the legal system, not as members of
organic communities.
==========
2018 13:03:47
With each new technological innovation, new fears arose that it would have a
particularly devastating effect on the nature of work.
==========
2018 13:04:46
Work is essentially regarded as disutility: something painful that people would

rather not do. They do not work for the sake of work but rather for the sake of the
incomes that they receive in return for work, which they spend in their leisure
time. All work, therefore,
==========
2018 13:04:50
Work is essentially regarded as disutility: something painful that people would

rather not do. They do not work for the sake of work but rather for the sake of the
incomes that they receive in return for work, which they spend in their leisure
time. All work, therefore, is undertaken ultimately for the sake of leisure.
==========
2018 13:05:27
Death, in the Christian tradition,, is regarded as a respite from the toil that
accompanies life; hence the inscription on tombstones reading Requiescat in Pacem.
==========
2018 13:06:08
There is another tradition, however, and it is more closely associated with Marx:
people are both productive and consuming creatures and find satisfaction in the
mastery and transformation of nature through work.
==========
2018 13:08:43
consumers have become more affluent and educated, their desire for differentiated
products has grown,
==========
2018 13:08:48
As consumers have become more affluent and educated, their desire for
differentiated products has grown, leading to greater market segmentation, smaller
production runs, and the consequent need for craftlike flexibility in
manufacturing.
==========
2018 13:09:36
Sabel calls the “intellectualization of skill,” by which mechanical skills were

replaced with quasi-mechanical ones requiring a much greater intellectual input
from the worker.25
==========
2018 13:10:48
Elton Mayo’s so-called “human relations” movement of the 1930s, which sought less
rigid, more communally oriented workplaces.
==========
14:31:37
All such learning takes place – or took place originally – as a consequence of

contact with novelty, or anomaly.
==========
14:32:07
What is novel is of course dependent on what is known – is necessarily defined in

opposition to what is known. Furthermore, what is known is always known
conditionally, since human knowledge is necessarily limited.
==========
14:32:39
We act, to transform “where we are” into “where we would like to be.”

==========
14:32:47
We evaluate the “unbearable present” in relationship to the “ideal future.”

==========
14:34:23
The “domain of the known” and the “domain of the unknown” can reasonably be
regarded as permanent constituent elements of human experience – even of the human
environment.
==========
14:35:44
Mythological representations of the world – which are representations of reality as
a forum for action – portray the dynamic interrelationship between all three
constituent elements of human experience.
==========
14:38:27
The eternal knower, finally – the process that mediates between the known and the
unknown – is the knight who slays the dragon of chaos, the hero who replaces
disorder and confusion with clarity and certainty, the sun-god who eternally slays
the forces of darkness, and the “word” that engenders creation of the cosmos.
==========
16:02:37
Most things are irrelevant – and that is a good thing, as we have limited
attentional resources.
==========
16:44:23
Marxist intellectual legacy, which regarded work – creative action – as the

defining feature of man.
==========
16:47:19
We do model facts, but we concern ourselves with valence, or value.

==========
16:47:41
It is not enough to know that something is. It is equally necessary to know what it
signifies.
==========
20:43:03
But we model facts to keep track of meaning.

==========
20:44:33
“Revolutionary” narratives, by contrast, describe the process by which “normal”

narratives are transformed, when that becomes necessary.
==========
20:46:52
What Sokolov discovered, to put it bluntly, is that human beings (and other
animals, far down the phylogenetic chain) are characterized by an innate response
to what they cannot predict, do not want, and can not understand.
==========
20:47:24
“If problems are accepted, and dealt with before they arise, they might even be
prevented before confusion begins. In this way peace may be maintained
==========
20:48:07
Your model of the desired future is clearly predicated on what you currently know.
==========
20:49:09
Your actions are designed to produce your ideal – designed to transform the present
into something ever more closely resembling what you want. Your are confident in
your model of reality, in your story; when you put it into action, you get results.
==========
20:53:00
Detailed description of the processes governing these common affective occurrences

provides the basis for proper understanding of human motivation.
==========
20:53:15
unknown could serve as an unconditioned stimulus.

==========
20:53:19
the unknown could serve as an unconditioned stimulus.

==========
20:54:04
The worst the unknown could be, in general, is death (or, perhaps, lengthy
suffering followed by death); the fact of our vulnerable mortality provides the
limiting case.
==========
20:55:54
Conversely – the child who has not completed her homework is thrilled when the bell
signalling class end rings, before she is called upon. The bell signals the absence
of an expected punishment, and therefore induces positive affect, relief, happine
==========
20:56:02
of an expected punishment, and therefore
==========
20:56:19
of an expected punishment, and therefore induces positive affect, relief,
happiness.36
==========
20:56:53
The individual uses his or her knowledge to construct a hypothetical state of

affairs, where the motivational balance of ongoing events is optimized: where there
is sufficient satisfaction, minimal punishment, tolerable threat, and abundant
hope, all balanced together properly over the short and longer terms.
==========
20:59:45
conceptualized in episodic imagery – in fantasy. We constantly compare the world at

present to the world idealized in fantasy, render affective judgment, and act, in
consequence.
==========
20:59:48
fantasy. We constantly compare the world at present to the world idealized in

fantasy, render affective judgment, and act, in consequence.
==========
20:59:50
We constantly compare the world at present to the world idealized in fantasy,

render affective judgment, and act, in consequence.
==========
21:02:31
the realm of predictability, or to exploit them for previously unconsidered

potential, by altering our behavior, or our patterns of representation.
==========
21:02:35
We strive to bring novel occurrences back into the realm of predictability, or to

exploit them for previously unconsidered potential, by altering our behavior, or
our patterns of representation.
==========
21:04:11
We evaluate the 34 significance of ongoing events in light of their perceived

relationship to the goal.
==========
21:04:28
We modify our actions within the game, but accept the rules without question.
==========
21:09:18
simple movement from present to future is occasionally interrupted by a complete

breakdown and reformulation: is occasionally interrupted by re-constitution of what
the present is and what the future should be. The ascent of the individual, so to
speak, is punctuated by periods of “dissolution and rebirth.”
==========
2018 14:36:27
It is reasonable to regard the world, as forum for action, as a “place” – a place

made up of the familiar, and the unfamiliar, in eternal juxtaposition.
==========
2018 14:40:02
and that every one of them would like only too well to represent just itself as the
ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives.
==========
2018 14:47:28
Things have no absolutely fixed significance, despite our ability to generalize

about their value.
==========
2018 14:58:59
This is tantamount to saying, “you must know everything that has ever happened to
that animal”; analogous to the old determinist claim that “if you knew the present
position and momentum of every particle in the universe, you could determine all
future positions and momenta.”
==========
2018 15:48:20
svelte
==========
2018 15:52:40
she is likely to make drinking her goal. We share fundamental biological structure,
as human beings, so we tend to agree, broadly, about what should be regarded as
valuable (at least in a specified context).
==========
2018 16:00:13
The man obsessed with power may sacrifice everything – including his family – to
the attainment of his narrow ambition. The empathic consideration of others, a
time-consuming business, merely impedes his progress with regards to those things
he deems of ultimate value. His faith in the value of his progress therefore makes
threat and frustration even of
==========
2018 16:00:15
threat and frustration even of
==========
2018 16:00:24
threat and frustration even of love.
==========
2018 16:30:46
“Out of control” means, most basically, unpredictable: something is beyond us when

our interactions with it produce phenomena whose properties could not be
determined, beforehand.
==========
2018 10:12:10
Perhaps the simplest way to produce an event of this sort is to randomly and rarely
insert a tone that differs in frequency into a repetitious sequence of otherwise
predictable tones (although the stimulus might just as easily be visual or
tactile). These “odd-ball” events are characterized by (relative) novelty (novelty
is always relative) and evoke a pattern of cortical electrical activity that
differs from that produced by the predictable tones.
==========
2018 10:46:43
China didn’t have feudalism, but it did have a powerful authoritarian state, a
class of landlords, and a vast mass of dependent and impoverished peasants.
==========
2018 10:48:54
Although many of the new postindependence Latin American governments were nominally
democratic, they were never able to generate more than a moderate amount of state
capacity.
==========
2018 10:49:09
The failure to create modern states was marked first and foremost by the inability
of Latin American states to extract significant levels of taxation from their own
populations.
==========
2018 11:02:04
Charles Tilly’s aphorism “war made the state, and the state made war”
==========
2018 11:36:08
In China and early modern Europe, the resource requirements of long-term warfare
led states to tax their citizens, create finance ministries and bureaucracies to
administer the tax extraction, build administrative hierarchies to manage extensive
logistical systems, and the like.
==========
2018 11:36:26
Organized violence also promoted political development through the wholesale

elimination of certain social classes that were bulwarks of the old patrimonial
state, like the venal officeholders of Old Regime France or the Junker class in
Prussia.6 Similar developments
==========
2018 11:36:33
Organized violence also promoted political development through the wholesale

elimination of certain social classes that were bulwarks of the old patrimonial
state, like the venal officeholders of Old Regime
==========
2018 11:43:06
Having created patronage-ridden states, the countries of Latin America have faced
what political scientist Barbara Geddes has called the “politician’s dilemma.” As
in nineteenth-century America, there was a clear public interest in reforming the
state and putting it on a more meritocratic foundation. But doing so would cut into
the politicians’ fund of political capital, so few had incentives to proceed.
==========
2018 11:43:21
Geddes argues that reform took place only under special conditions, such as when
the political parties were balanced and none would get a special advantage by
pushing for reform.
==========
2018 11:46:11
They limited the degree to which elites in any given country were willing to push
for total mobilization of the population, since this would entail putting guns into
the hands of restive nonelites.
==========
2018 11:46:49
Europe, demands for expanded popular participation came on the heels of war; the
rise of the British Labour Party in the 1920s, for example, was in some ways a
consequence of the sufferings of the working class in the trenches of World War
==========
2018 11:48:35
Though Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia border on Brazil, none has strong
communications links with the largest economy in the region simply because of the
difficulty of penetrating the Amazonian jungle.
==========
2018 11:54:56
who have control over their destinies, even as material conditions shape the
choices they face.
==========
2018 11:55:03
Human beings, in other words, are agents who have control over their destinies,
even as material conditions shape the choices they face.
==========
2018 11:56:05
happened in Costa Rica. Unlike El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, there were no
military coups, dictatorships, bloody civil wars, death squads, or foreign
intervention on the part of the United States, Cuba, or other outside parties for
the last sixty years. Rather, it has been a stable democracy since 1948 with
competitive elections and regular turnovers of power between political parties.
This has been the case despite the fact that Costa Rica’s development has been
based primarily on tropical agricultural products—coffee and bananas—and that its
climate and resource endowments are virtually indistinguishable from those of its
neighbors.
==========
2018 12:06:10
it is very difficult to fit Costa Rica into any of the existing theoretical
structures that purport to explain economic or political development.
==========
2018 12:08:17
The fact that Argentina never became the Canada of the South suggests the limits of
all general theories of development that are purely economic in nature.
==========
2018 12:18:54
Argentina’s poor performance has generated a small industry devoted to the question
of what sociologist Carlos Waisman labels the “Argentine riddle” of reversed
development.15 A proximate answer to this question
==========
2018 12:19:06
of what sociologist Carlos Waisman labels
==========
2018 12:19:13
of what sociologist Carlos Waisman labels the “Argentine riddle” of reversed
development.
==========
2018 12:28:43
Samuel Huntington argues that for political order to be achieved during the process
of modernization, institutions must accommodate increasing demands for political
participation.
==========
2018 12:31:39
Yrigoyen himself perfected the personalistic political style of Rosas, building a

cult of personality around himself rather than around the ideas represented by his
party.
==========
2018 20:57:46
Argentina from Peru and Mexico was that it had no impoverished peasantry that could
organize to demand radical land reform.
==========
2018 20:59:55
The military was thus prepared to join forces with the old oligarchy to close off
the system to the new social actors.
==========
2018 21:05:04
Costa Rica and Argentina have something in common: they both failed to follow the
predictions of materialist theories of how early colonial institutions or natural
resource endowments determine contemporary success, in either economic development
or political institution building. This doesn’t mean that the theories are
necessarily wrong. It does mean that they are insufficient to fully explain the
process of political development in many specific cases.
==========
2018 21:06:25
Africa’s problem was that the colonial authorities wanted to exercise dominion on
the cheap and failed to leave behind much of an institutional legacy at all.
==========
2018 21:06:29
Africa’s problem was that the colonial authorities wanted to exercise dominion on
the cheap and failed to leave behind much of an institutional legacy at all. If
states in Latin America were weak and failed to evolve into modern Weberian
bureaucracies, in sub-Saharan Africa states were often missing altogether.
==========
2018 21:10:28
Many of these conflicts were driven by global demand for African commodities such
as diamonds, copper, cobalt, cotton, and oil, and were facilitated by weapons and
mercenaries provided by developed countries.
==========
2018 21:11:11
But as Collier himself would be the first to admit, conflict is itself driven by
weak institutions. If a country has legitimate, strong, and effective political
institutions, the discovery of diamonds or oil on its territory will not tempt
rebel groups to grab them or foreign powers to meddle in their exploitation.
==========
2018 21:11:26
economist Paul Collier

==========
2018 21:13:03
Political scientists have labeled this type of governance “neopatrimonialism.”

Throughout this book I have used Max Weber’s term “patrimonial” to refer to
governments staffed by the family and friends of the ruler, and run for their
benefit.
==========
2018 21:14:49
The authority of presidents was enormous and not shared with legislatures, courts,
or ministers, regardless of what the constitution said.
==========
2018 21:15:33
Among the reasons that Nelson Mandela, the first black president of South Africa,
stood out among revolutionary African political leaders was the fact that he
voluntarily relinquished the presidency after a single five-year term.
==========
2018 21:15:52
second characteristic of African neopatrimonialism was massive use of state

resources to cultivate political support, which resulted in pervasive clientelism.
==========
2018 21:19:29
Africa, however, the single most important characteristic, as Jeffrey Herbst has
argued, is their underlying weakness.9 Using again the Weberian definition, the
strength of a state is measured by its ability to make and enforce rules over a
defined territory, something that is a matter not just of physical coercion but
also of legitimate authority.
==========
2018 21:33:10
As we have seen, state capacity can also be understood in terms of whether the
government exercises a monopoly of force over its own territory. Sub-Saharan Africa
after independence has been subject to a host of civil wars, separatist movements,
rebellions, coups, and other internal conflicts, many of which are ongoing. Sierra
Leone, Liberia, and Somalia all experienced total state failure and collapsed into
warlordism during the 1990s.
==========
2018 21:34:40
Unlike East Asia, Africa had no long-standing tradition of bureaucratic government,

and no trained cadre of state officials who were capable of taking over the
administrative systems left behind by the departing colonial governments.
==========
2018 21:49:24
What East Asia had that Latin America needed more of and that Africa lacked almost
entirely were strong, coherent states that could control violence and carry out
good, economically rational public policies.
==========
2018 21:51:40
Africa was intensively colonized only in the period after 1882, in what David
Abernethy labeled the third phase of European colonialism. Phase one had begun with
the Spanish and Portuguese conquests in the New World, and phase two was a period
of contraction from the revolt of the North American colonies to the aftermath of
the Napoleonic Wars.
==========
2018 21:51:44
the Napoleonic Wars. Phase three began with the Anglo-Burmese War of 1824 and
culminated in the “scramble for Africa” that began in the last decades of the
century.14 There were a number
==========
2018 21:51:50
the Napoleonic Wars. Phase three began with the Anglo-Burmese War of 1824 and
culminated in the “scramble for Africa” that began in the last decades of the
century.
==========
2018 21:55:40
Europe largely lost interest in what Africa could produce after the abolition of
slavery and the end of the triangular trade in slaves, sugar, rum, and manufactured
goods that had been so critical in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
==========
2018 21:57:25
The scramble for Africa occurred after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin
of Species and the rise of a doctrine of “scientific racism” asserting that the
existing hierarchy among the world’s races was the result of the inherent
biological superiority of white Europeans over everyone
==========
2018 21:57:32
The scramble for Africa occurred after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin
of Species and the rise of a doctrine of “scientific racism” asserting that the
existing hierarchy among the world’s races was the result of the inherent
biological superiority of white Europeans over everyone else.
==========
2018 22:00:00
the economist Ester Boserup and others have argued that the reverse was also true,
with larger populations spurring the need for technological change by increasing
demand and permitting a greater specialization.
==========
2018 22:00:22
Whichever direction causality ran, the level of technological backwardness of

precolonial Africa was striking: the plow had not been adopted in agriculture,
which everywhere remained rain fed rather than irrigation based, and sophisticated
metalworking was not developed.
==========
2018 22:01:58
entrepôts,
==========
2018 22:02:16
Maps of the interior were not available until the explorations of Richard Burton,
David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, and John Hanning Speke in the later part
of the nineteenth century.
==========
2018 22:04:16
chiefdoms,
==========
2018 22:05:50
classic segmentary lineage—a tribe, speaking anthropologically—is a group that

traces common ancestry to a progenitor who may be two, three, or more generations
distant.
==========
2018 22:05:59
The system is held together by a very specific set of beliefs about the power of
dead ancestors and unborn descendants to affect the fortunes of the living.
==========
2018 22:06:54
in order to make them more tractable. Today,

==========
2018 22:07:03
Today, one of the main functions of ethnic identity is to act as a signaling device
in the clientelistic division of state resources: if you are a Kikuyu and can elect
a Kikuyu president, you are much more likely to be favored with government jobs,
public works projects, and the like.
==========
2018 22:08:22
The reasons for this derive from the characteristics of the second wave of
colonialism described above. The interests of European governments were much more
strategic than economic; they wanted to make sure that they could protect existing
dependencies and prevent new powers from outflanking them.
==========
2018 22:10:27
and missionaries, who saw Africa as ripe for conversion and cultural conquest.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 340 | location 5204-5207 | Added on Thursday, 1 February
2018 00:51:03
Robert D. Kaplan and others have suggested that in West Africa the veneer of
civilization had broken down, and these societies were returning to an older,
primordial form of tribalism, only fought with modern weapons.2 This answer
reflects a great deal of ignorance about historical Africa, and about tribalism
more broadly.
==========
2018 00:51:11
Robert D. Kaplan and others have suggested that in West Africa the veneer of
civilization had broken down, and these societies were returning to an older,
primordial form of tribalism, only fought with modern weapons.2
==========
2018 00:52:44
An alternative explanation of why a country like Sierra Leone came to be racked by

horrific violence is colonialism. The history of European colonialism includes
systematic and intensive brutality against indigenous populations.3 The practice of
hacking off hands and arms as warnings in Sierra Leone that so outraged Western
opinion was originally practiced by the Force Publique in Leopold’s Belgian Congo:
according to one account, “Soldiers in the Congo were told to account for every
cartridge fired, so they hacked off and smoked the hands, feet and private parts of
their victims. Body parts were presented to commanders in baskets as proof that
soldiers had done their work well.”
==========
2018 00:54:20
equivalent post, with a loss of

==========
2018 00:54:37
Indeed, an entire academic discipline devoted to exposing the horrors of European

colonialism emerged in the late twentieth century, which sought to explain how
contemporary Africa’s many problems are rooted in the colonial experience. Many of
the newer economic theories tracing poor governance to extractive colonial
institutions have joined hands with this earlier school of thought.
==========
2018 00:57:30
The horrors of Sierra Leone—and of Liberia, Somalia, and the Congo—represented an

extreme version of state weakness, where the postindependence state collapsed
completely. The vacuum was filled not by traditional African society but by a half-
modernized hybrid of deracinated young men who organized themselves to take
advantage of the global economy and exploit natural resource rents from diamonds
and other commodities.
==========
2018 00:57:58
All states concentrate and use power—that is, the ability to violently coerce
people—but successful states rely more heavily on authority, that is, voluntary
compliance with the state’s wishes based on a broad belief in the government’s
legitimacy.
==========
2018 00:58:19
In peaceful liberal democracies, the fist is usually hidden behind layered gloves
of law, custom, and norms. States that make heavy use of overt coercion and
brutality often do so because they cannot exercise proper authority. They have what
Michael Mann labels “despotic power” but not “infrastructural power” to penetrate
and shape society.
==========
2018 00:59:36
In writings like The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, he asserted that
efforts to impose European law and institutions on unwilling African subjects were
counterproductive, and that indigenous peoples were better and more justly
==========
2018 00:59:46
counterproductive, and that indigenous peoples were better and more justly governed
using their own customary
==========
2018 00:59:50
counterproductive, and that indigenous peoples were better and more justly
==========
2018 00:59:57
counterproductive, and that indigenous peoples were better and more justly governed
using their own customary practices.
==========
2018 01:01:27
their impoverished territories; in the words of Earl Grey, “The surest test for the
soundness of measures for the improvement of an uncivilised people is that they
should be self-sufficient.”
==========
2018 01:01:40
Earl Grey, “The surest test for the soundness of measures for the improvement of an
uncivilised people is that they should be self-sufficient.”
==========
2018 01:03:46
E. E. Evans-Pritchard who sought to identify “authentic” legal traditions.

==========
2018 01:03:55
uncover what was termed “native law and custom.” Whatever else one might say about
the search for tradition, it gave a tremendous boost to the new field of
anthropology, where colonial governments promoted the work of researchers such as
Charles Meek and E. E. Evans-Pritchard who sought to identify “authentic” legal
traditions.
==========
2018 01:04:00
recover local tradition led to a scramble to uncover what was termed “native law
and custom.” Whatever else one might say about the search for tradition, it gave a
tremendous boost to the new field of anthropology, where colonial governments
promoted the work of researchers such as Charles Meek and E. E. Evans-Pritchard who
sought to identify “authentic” legal traditions.
==========
2018 01:04:03
Whatever else one might say about the search for tradition, it gave a tremendous
boost to the new field of anthropology, where colonial governments promoted the
work of researchers such as Charles Meek and E. E. Evans-Pritchard who sought to
identify “authentic” legal traditions.
==========
2018 01:07:35
who had the authority to alienate property. One reason to create a subordinate
tribal chief under indirect rule was to empower an African equivalent of a European
feudal lord who had the authority to alienate communal property into a modern
property rights system.16
==========
2018 01:07:46
One reason to create a subordinate tribal chief under indirect rule was to empower
an African equivalent of a European feudal lord who had the authority to alienate
communal property into a modern property rights system.16
==========
2018 01:08:20
A second reason for empowering indigenous chiefs was to serve as tax collectors.
All colonial governments established poll or capitation taxes on each male in the
colony to raise revenues so that the colony could pay for its own administration.
==========
2018 01:08:36
making subjects pay a tax in cash, they were encouraged to move out of the bush and
into the cash economy where they could serve as a labor
==========
2018 01:08:39
making subjects pay a tax in cash, they were encouraged to move out of the bush and
into the cash economy where they could serve as a labor force for European
commercial agriculture.
==========
2018 01:11:55
morals, which barred certain practices as repugnant

==========
2018 01:12:19
And Africans were never given leave to truly

==========
2018 01:12:48
Customary law had to be in accord with European morals, which barred certain
practices as repugnant (suttee, the burning of widows in India, was perhaps the
most famous case of this).
==========
2018 01:13:32
New traditions, in order to be accepted, had to be based on something actually

already existing in the culture.
==========
2018 01:14:50
they were too naïve or ignorant to know better. In the

==========
2018 01:14:55
In the words of Karen Fields, “Indirect rule was a way of making the colonial state
a consumer of power generated within the customary order. It did not transfer real
power from the Crown to African rulers. Just the inverse: Real power issued from
the ruled.”
==========
2018 01:17:27
rule was invented, is significantly poorer than the southern half of the country,
which was more exposed to modernizing forces.
==========
2018 01:17:33
Today, Northern Nigeria, the region where indirect rule was invented, is
significantly poorer than the southern half of the country, which was more exposed
to modernizing forces.
==========
2018 01:20:14
The stated goal was “assimilation” of the colonies into the French system. But
while French language and education were imposed, there was no long-term path for
most African subjects to eventually become French citizens.
==========
2018 01:21:42
theories to situations where they don’t apply. British administration tended to

reward the specialists, while the French model encouraged generalists. Thus French
colonial officers were moved around every few years, not just within Africa but to
completely different parts of the empire. As a result, very few of them learned to
speak indigenous languages or acquired local knowledge.
==========
2018 01:24:13
The discipline of anthropology, having started out as a tool of European

colonialism, became a powerful voice arguing for the equal dignity of indigenous
cultures.27
==========
2018 01:26:28
The breakdown of Sierra Leone was one long-term consequence of this legacy. As one
of Britain’s oldest colonies in Africa, Sierra Leone was ruled indirectly, through
a network of chiefs who were alternately
==========
2018 01:26:43
The breakdown of Sierra Leone was one long-term consequence of this legacy. As one
of Britain’s oldest colonies in Africa, Sierra Leone was ruled indirectly, through
a network of chiefs who were alternately bribed and intimidated by the white
administration in Freetown. When the country received its independence in 1961,
there was no modern state to speak of.
==========
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2018 11:26:28
This is most evident in the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s,
where creating viable states has been central first to America’s “war on
terrorism,” and then to its ability to exit these countries with a modicum of
credibility.
==========
2018 11:28:34
By the late 1990s, in the wake of atrocities committed in places like Bosnia and
Rwanda, a new doctrine called the “responsibility to protect” had emerged, which
enjoined the international community to take positive action to safeguard the human
rights of peoples threatened by conflict and repression.1 The goal of these new
postconflict interventions quickly evolved.
==========
2018 11:29:00
By the late 1990s, in the wake of atrocities committed in places like Bosnia and
Rwanda, a new doctrine called the “responsibility to protect” had emerged, which
enjoined the international community to take positive action to safeguard the human
rights of peoples threatened by conflict and repression.
==========
2018 11:29:49
The goal of these new postconflict interventions quickly evolved. They began with
efforts to promote cease-fires and keep the peace in conflict zones. But it soon
became evident that there would be no lasting peace without institutions, and that
the international community’s ability to exit these troubled places in fact
depended on the societies acquiring stable governments that could provide security
without outside help. Thus the mandate for intervention expanded from peacekeeping
to state building.
==========
2018 11:32:08
Indeed, there is some argument that well-meaning humanitarian interventions in

Somalia and the eastern Congo actually prolonged the crisis by inadvertently aiding
one of the parties to the conflict.3 Results of state building are very
disappointing.
==========
2018 11:32:15
Indeed, there is some argument that well-meaning humanitarian interventions in

Somalia and the eastern Congo actually prolonged the crisis by inadvertently aiding
one of the parties to the conflict.
==========
2018 11:33:01
Results of state building are very disappointing. The United States is scheduled to
withdraw its forces from Afghanistan in 2016 without having created a functional,
legitimate centralized state. Iraq seemed to have more of a state, but the latter’s
authority in the areas north of Baghdad collapsed in 2014. Repeated interventions
and billions of dollars in foreign assistance have yet to create functional
governments in either Haiti or Somalia. In other cases, like the Balkans and the
Solomon Islands, basic stability has been maintained only through heavy continuing
outside involvement. These failures have engendered a prolonged discussion of the
conditions under which institutions are
==========
2018 11:33:21
Results of state building are very disappointing. The United States is scheduled to
withdraw its forces from Afghanistan in 2016 without having created a functional,
legitimate centralized state. Iraq seemed to have more of a state, but the latter’s
authority in the areas north of Baghdad collapsed in 2014. Repeated interventions
and billions of dollars in foreign assistance have yet to create functional
governments in either Haiti or Somalia. In other cases, like the Balkans and the
Solomon Islands, basic stability has been maintained only through heavy continuing
outside involvement. These failures have engendered a prolonged discussion of the
conditions under which institutions are created and strengthened, and the role that
outsiders can potentially play in promoting them.
==========
2018 11:34:05
Many of the precedents and examples set by European colonialism are irrelevant to
present-day interventions. Colonial powers were most successful in implanting
modern institutions in places where the indigenous peoples were so weak, small in
numbers, and primitively organized
==========
2018 11:34:20
Many of the precedents and examples set by European colonialism are irrelevant to
present-day interventions. Colonial powers were most successful in implanting
modern institutions in places where the indigenous peoples were so weak, small in
numbers, and primitively organized that they could be effectively killed off by war
or disease, herded into reservations, or otherwise eliminated from the picture.
==========
2018 11:41:16
outside powers try to impose their own models of good institutions on a country,
they are likely to produce what Lant Pritchett, Michael Woolcock, and Matt Andrews
call “isomorphic mimicry”: a copying of the outward forms of Western institutions
but without their substance.
==========
2018 11:41:20
outside powers try to impose their own models of good institutions on a country,
==========
2018 11:41:28
If outside powers try to impose their own models of good institutions on a country,
==========
2018 11:42:05
you can’t build a steel plant in a country in which there is no market for steel,
no supply of competent managers or workers, no infrastructure to move product to
market, and no legal system to protect the rights of the plant’s investors.
==========
2018 11:42:57
In light of these considerations, a number of observers have suggested that the

international community ought to dramatically scale back its ambitions and go for
“good enough” governance, seeking to get not to Denmark but to some more realistic
objective, like Indonesia or Botswana.
==========
2018 11:43:42
Rather than requiring people to vote for nonexistent programmatic parties, why not
accept the reality of clientelism and aim instead for rent-seeking coalitions that
nonetheless promote stability and some degree of economic growth?
==========
2018 11:47:49
The problem with outside promotion of indigenous rights, however, is that it is

very difficult for outsiders to accurately judge the real interests of local
communities, just as it was for the practitioners of indirect rule.
==========
2018 11:48:10
Many of these communities are already half modernized, just as many Africans were
in the early twentieth century, and many would actually have jumped at the chance
to join the modern world. Continuing to live in a traditional village and speaking
a local language may represent a dramatic closing of opportunities, something often
overlooked by the well-meaning outsiders claiming to speak on their behalf.
==========
2018 11:49:58
Like colonial officials trying to implement indirect rule, CDD projects solicit
community views on what sorts of local investments to make with donor funds,
whether irrigation, roads, latrines, and the like.
==========
2018 11:50:15
The outside donors hire local facilitators who presumably have sufficient local
knowledge to be able to organize village communities and get fair representations
of their views. The very act of organizing as a community will build, it is hoped,
social capital that will last beyond the termination of the project.
==========
2018 11:50:56
CDD projects run into two distinct problems, however. The first is knowing what the
real views of the community are. Like communities everywhere, villages are
dominated by local elites, often older men who claim to speak on behalf of the
group as a whole. It is very hard to know whether a particular community
spokesperson is really reflecting general interests or is a locally powerful person
who simply wants the latrine built near his house. In order to get around problems
like this, the outside donors force the community to include women, minorities (if
there are any), or other marginalized people, in accord not with local but with
Western standards of fairness.
==========
2018 11:51:14
either is forced to leave things up to local elites, or

==========
2018 11:51:39
social engineering.
==========
2018 11:53:47
As in Korea, Tokyo sought to Japanize the island, including making Taiwanese speak
Japanese and using it as a platform for commodity exports to Japan. But they also
pursued developmental objectives, building substantial infrastructure, schools, and
a local state administration, all of which survived after the Japanese departed.
==========
2018 11:56:35
They failed to recognize that in the Philippines, in contrast to America,

widespread illiteracy meant that legal proceedings would be dominated by educated
elites, who then succeeded in grabbing large estates despite the Americans’
explicit desire to promote land reform.
==========
2018 11:57:41
We should thus be wary of foreigners bearing gifts of institutions. Foreigners

seldom have enough local knowledge to understand how to construct durable states.
When their efforts at institution building are halfhearted and underresourced, they
often do more damage than good. This is not to say that Western models of
development don’t work, or don’t have some degree of universal validity. But each
society must adapt them to its own conditions and build on indigenous traditions.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 366 | location 5600-5601 | Added on Sunday, 4 February
2018 11:13:55
We saw in previous chapters that existence of a strong national identity was

critical to the success of state building in Europe.
==========
2018 11:14:28
In the vacuum left by colonialism, some newly independent countries like Nigeria
and Kenya made little effort to create a new national identity, and they have been
plagued in later years by high levels of ethnic conflict.
==========
2018 11:15:52
When the British took over Nigeria, they did not conquer a large, well-established
centralized state, as when they subdued the Mughal Empire in India.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 367 | location 5624-5625 | Added on Monday, 5 February
2018 00:34:43
Sunil Khilnani argues that, in a certain sense, the very “idea of India” as a
political unit was created in colonial times around these institutions and the
democratic ideals that were slowly being transmitted.
==========
2018 00:36:24
What is notable about Nigeria is that it never had a strong nationalist party that
contested British rule or sought to pursue a nation-building strategy once in
power. Rather, sovereignty was handed to the Nigerians
==========
2018 00:36:31
power. Rather, sovereignty was handed
==========
2018 00:36:35
power. Rather, sovereignty was handed to the Nigerians on a platter by the British.
==========
2018 00:37:22
The lack of a national identity soon led to the breakdown of the country and its
descent into civil war.
==========
2018 00:38:49
Political corruption and clientelism are the price that Nigerians have had to pay
for stability and for their lack of an overarching national identity.
==========
2018 00:40:30
very small indigenous elite with access to European education emerged and began to
adopt concepts like nationalism and Marxism from the West.
==========
2018 10:35:28
He defined the Indonesian nation in the broadest possible terms, without reference
to any of the country’s ethnic groups, while he accepted religion but neutered it
by reference not to Islam but to generic monotheism.
==========
2018 10:38:37
The mechanism for cultural assimilation was education.

==========
2018 10:39:23
One of the more important achievements of Suharto’s New Order period was the
expansion of primary education, where coverage rose from 55.6 to 87.6 percent of
the population between 1971 and
==========
2018 10:39:41
the population between 1971 and
==========
2018 10:39:45
expansion of primary education, where coverage rose from 55.6 to 87.6 percent
==========
2018 10:39:48
the population between 1971 and 1985.
==========
2018 10:40:24
Indonesian national identity was entrenched in a way that Nigerian national

identity would never be—through articulation of a clear integrative ideology,
establishment of a national language, and the backing of both by authoritarian
power based on a national army.
==========
2018 10:43:18
Indonesian identity by the 1990s had become sufficiently secure that when the
country as a whole transitioned to democracy after the Asian financial crisis in
the late 1990s, it was able to permit a substantial devolution of power to its
provinces and localities without fear of further fragmentation.
==========
2018 10:44:58
Indeed, the border between the two countries is an unnaturally straight line drawn
by colonial authorities running from Lake Victoria in the west eventually to the
Indian Ocean, which artificially separates the peoples who straddled
==========
2018 10:45:03
Indian Ocean, which artificially separates the peoples who straddled
==========
2018 10:45:17
Indian Ocean, which artificially
==========
2018 10:45:35
Indian Ocean, which artificially separates the peoples who straddled it.
==========
2018 10:47:41
Tanzania had certain preexisting advantages over Kenya in formulating a national

identity. None of its 120 ethnic groups is large enough to potentially dominate the
country, whereas Kenya has five major ones, constituting some 70 percent of the
population.19 An alliance of any two of these larger groups—Kikuyu, Kalenjin, Luo,
Kamba, Luhya—is often sufficient to gain control of the government.
==========
2018 10:49:59
Tanzania’s founding president, Julius Nyerere, played a role similar to that of

Sukarno in Indonesia. He explicitly built national identity around socialist
ideology rather than ethnicity with his doctrine of ujamaa or African socialism,
articulated clearly and at great length in his writings and in documents like the
1967 Arusha Declaration.21 He argued that ethnic fractionalization was a grave
threat to the socialist project and therefore made efforts to suppress what he
labeled “tribalism.”
==========
2018 10:54:41
Strong national identity does not by itself create good outcomes; it must be linked
to sensible policies as well.
==========
2018 10:55:46
And it discouraged foreign private investment in favor of “self-sufficiency.”

==========
2018 10:58:20
No one would have the authority to write a national narrative or declare a new
national language. Sequencing and history therefore matter with regard to common
identity, as they did to the creation of a modern state.
==========
2018 19:50:11
Originally established on a narrow oligarchic basis, parliaments could become the

vehicles for the assertion of power by rising new social forces that organized
political parties and sought broadened representation.
==========
2018 16:55:48
By contrast, East Asian political development began not with rule of law but with
the state. Because of its lack of a transcendental religion, China never developed
a body of law that stood outside the positive enactments of the emperor and had no
legal hierarchy independent of executive power.
==========
2018 17:01:20
The latter began after the arrival of U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry’s “black ships”
in 1853 and presents a paradigmatic case of what Samuel Huntington labeled
“defensive modernization.” Demands by Perry and other Western powers to open Japan
to outsiders led to the concession of various unequal treaties granting foreigners
market access. This capitulation delegitimized the Tokugawa government and sparked
an armed rebellion, which set in motion the restoration of a centralized state in
1868 in the name of the Emperor Meiji. The urgency of the restoration was animated
by the desire to avoid the fate of China, which had lost pieces of coastal
territory to foreign powers. Abrogation of the unequal treaties, and the colonial
powers’ recognition of Japan as an equal, remained central to Japan’s drive to
modernize through the first decades of the twentieth century. As in Prussia,
perception of military threat drove state building.
==========
2018 17:02:40
We tend to accept these historical facts as the natural consequence of Japan’s

decision to modernize. But compared to other parts of the world, these developments
are extraordinary. In Europe, the abolition of feudal privileges and the creation
of a modern, centralized state was a process that extended, depending on the
country, from the late sixteenth to the late nineteenth century and involved
enormous levels of often violent social conflict.
==========
2018 17:03:01
Pakistan, for example, continues to be dominated by an entrenched quasi-feudal

landed elite that has no intention of giving up its privileges. Somalia and Libya
have been unable to force their militias into a new national army. In Japan, by
contrast, consolidation of a modern state was accomplished in just over a decade.
==========
2018 17:05:44
As in the Prussian bureaucracy, Japanese officials were screened in competitive

examinations and entered as a class. It was difficult to make patronage
appointments because there was almost no opportunity for lateral or midcareer
entry.
==========
2018 17:08:59
in China, but differently from Europe, India, and the Middle East, law did not grow
out of an independent religious authority with its own hierarchy of judges and
interpreters.
==========
2018 17:09:40
part of their modernization effort, the Japanese invited Western legal scholars to
come to Japan to advise them, and sent out students and officials to study Western
law.
==========
2018 17:12:07
model of parliamentary sovereignty in favor of a more conservative one closer to
the Bismarck constitution of the German Empire.16 It vested sovereignty not in the
people of Japan, but in the emperor. All of the powers of subordinate bodies were
therefore derived from the emperor’s authority. He had the right to appoint
ministers, make war and peace, and thereby had exclusive control over the military.
==========
2018 17:56:10
It is of course much better to have a fully democratic constitution protecting

individual rights than the kind of semi-authoritarian one represented by the Meiji
Constitution, or for that matter the Bismarck constitution. Political orders that
concentrate too much power in a small set of hands invite abuse in both economic
and political affairs. A true rule of law has to be binding on the state itself and
the major elites that stand behind the state. Since there is no third party to
enforce the constitution, its durability depends much more on the degree to which
major interest groups see it in their self-interest to abide by its terms. So the
question that needs to be asked about Japan’s constitution is, Who were the social
and political actors that were pushing for limitations on the sovereign powers of
the emperor? Why did the Japanese oligarchs accept legal limitations on their
power, when they could have ruled in a much more arbitrary fashion?
==========
2018 17:57:57
Thus the Japanese constitution, in contrast to the English one, was not the result
of a prolonged conflict between two well-established social
==========
2018 17:58:28
Thus the Japanese constitution, in contrast to the English one, was not the result
of a prolonged conflict between two well-established social groups who agreed, in
effect, to share power. Nor was the Meiji Constitution the product of grassroots
mobilization on the part of middle- and lower-class social groups who sought to
force a constitution on a reluctant monarch, as happened during the French
Revolution. Virtually all observers agree that both the writing and the granting of
the new constitution were heavily top-down processes, pushed by actors at the
pinnacle of power like Itō Hirobumi. The oligarch’s hand may have been forced by
the Popular Rights Movement, but he remained in control of the political process at
all times. There was no equivalent of the Arab Spring in Japan.
==========
2018 17:59:00
The force ultimately driving Japan to establish a constitution was not a domestic
social group but the example of foreigners. No Western power was, at this point,
overtly trying to coerce Japan to grant a constitution. Rather, the Japanese
themselves saw adoption of a constitution as a necessary condition for their
recognition as a great power with rights equal to those of the West. They were
following a syllogism that said, “All modern states have constitutions; Japan
aspires to be a modern state; therefore
==========
2018 17:59:06
aspires to be a modern state; therefore Japan must have a constitution.”
==========
2018 17:59:11
aspires to be a modern state; therefore Japan must have a constitution.”
==========
2018 18:00:09
I would argue that the origin of Japan’s turn to the right in the 1930s was rooted
in this development rather than in any deeper social causes.
==========
2018 18:01:06
Moore’s arguments for why there was never a Chinese- or Russian-style peasant
revolution in Japan are fairly convincing. The Tokugawa system of taxation
encouraged increases in agricultural productivity in the century preceding the
Meiji Restoration.
==========
2018 18:01:28
Peasants were actually growing richer over time. Moreover, the collective manner in
which taxes were assessed, and the relative impersonality of the government as tax
collector, led to a high degree of communal solidarity or social capital at a
village level. This stands in sharp contrast to China, where tax farming—that is,
the outsourcing of tax collection to often predatory private agents—as well as
family-centered individualism bred distrust on the part of the peasantry.23 There
was a much higher degree of peasant discontent and anger in Qing China than in
Meiji Japan, an anger that would be ultimately mobilized by the Chinese Communist
Party.
==========
2018 18:08:43
Bureaucratic autonomy within the military was especially strong due to “the time-
honored right of local commanders to undertake operations in emergency situations
without waiting for direct orders from central military headquarters.”
==========
2018 18:08:47
Bureaucratic autonomy within the military was especially strong due to “the time-
honored right of local commanders to undertake operations in emergency situations
without waiting for direct orders from central military headquarters.”28 In the
course of the 1930s, the agents succeeded in turning themselves into principals.
==========
2018 18:10:00
The government of the defeated and occupied Japan had drafted a set of minor
revisions to the Meiji Constitution which, when leaked to the press, induced
General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, to order
the drafting of a very different document, which was delivered to a shocked
Japanese government in February 1946.
==========
2018 18:10:05
The government of the defeated and occupied Japan had drafted a set of minor
revisions to the Meiji Constitution which, when leaked to the press, induced
General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, to order
the drafting of a very different document, which was delivered to a shocked
Japanese government in February 1946.
==========
2018 18:10:08
The American draft contained a number of key changes. Sovereignty was no longer
vested in the emperor, but in the Japanese people; the peerage system was
abolished; a list of basic rights was enumerated and not qualified in the manner of
the Meiji Constitution; and the famous Article 9 renounced Japan’s right of
warmaking and maintenance of a military. The constitution was debated before a
newly elected Diet and came into effect on May 3, 1947.
==========
2018 18:11:31
Beate Sirota
==========
2018 18:21:23
The rise of the Democratic Party of Japan and its capture of the prime ministership
in 2009 represents, in some sense, the emergence of a stronger oppositional
culture. But its poor subsequent performance in response to events like the 2011
Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear crisis casts doubts on the durability of
this shift.
==========
2018 18:22:04
Japan’s position in the international system. Through Article 9 and the 1951 U.S.-
Japan Security Treaty, Japan has in effect outsourced an important element of its
security, the capacity for self-defense, to the United States.
==========
2018 18:22:08
system. Through Article 9 and the 1951 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, Japan has in
effect outsourced an important element of its security, the capacity for self-
defense, to the United States.
==========
2018 18:22:10
Japan’s position in the international system. Through Article 9 and the 1951 U.S.-
Japan Security Treaty, Japan has in effect outsourced an important element of its
security, the capacity for self-defense, to the United States.
==========
2018 18:22:18
Through Article 9 and the 1951 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, Japan has in effect
outsourced an important element of its security, the capacity for self-defense, to
the United States.
==========
2018 18:23:32
If the sovereign and the governed were expected to exert efforts for the common
good, the implication is that the masses could be educated and trained to rise up
to the point where they could meaningfully participate in the government.
==========
2018 18:23:44
George Akita,
==========
2018 18:29:38
In China, a centralized state with many of the characteristics that Weber

identified as modern existed already at the time of the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C.
==========
2018 18:32:56
Historian Kenneth Pomeranz argues that Europe had no significant technological or

institutional advantages over China in the middle of the eighteenth century.
==========
2018 18:32:59

institutional advantages over China in the middle of the eighteenth century. In his
view, Britain’s subsequent takeoff during the Industrial Revolution was largely the
accidental by-product of its access to abundant coal and
==========
2018 18:33:08

accidental by-product of its access to abundant coal and foreign supplies of raw
materials like
==========
2018 18:33:10

accidental by-product of its access to abundant coal and foreign supplies of raw
materials like cotton.4
==========
2018 18:38:14
transcendental religion, and there was never a pretense that law had a divine
origin. Law was seen as a rational human instrument by which the state exercised
its authority and maintained public order. This meant that, as in Japan, China had
rule by law rather than rule of
==========
2018 18:38:18
transcendental religion, and there was never a pretense that law had a divine
origin. Law was seen as a rational human instrument by which the state exercised
its authority and maintained public order. This meant that, as in Japan, China had
rule by law rather than rule of law.
==========
2018 18:39:10
culture. The Confucians believed that human life should be regulated not by formal,
written laws, but by morality.
==========
2018 18:39:18
The Confucians believed that human life should be regulated not by formal, written
laws, but by morality.
==========
2018 18:39:53
Good outcomes are produced not by the impersonal application of rules but by a sage
or superior man who can weigh local context.
==========
2018 18:41:09
“Law is the basis of stable government because, being fixed and known to all, it
provides an exact instrument with which to measure individual conduct.”
==========
2018 18:41:21
By contrast, “A government based on li cannot do this, since the li are unwritten,

particularistic and subject to arbitrary interpretation.”
==========
2018 18:43:34
The Chinese reformers were motivated, as were the Japanese, by fear that their
military and political weakness stemmed from defects in their traditional
institutions.
==========
2018 18:43:52
facing the International Monetary Fund, they understood that they had to align
their own practices with Western standards as a condition for being treated as
sovereign equals.
==========
2018 18:43:55
Much like contemporary developing countries facing the International Monetary Fund,
they understood that they had to align their own practices with Western standards
as a condition for being treated as sovereign equals.
==========
2018 18:47:54
When the Chinese Communists came to power in 1949, they liberated the mainland from
foreign occupation and
==========
2018 18:47:57
When the Chinese Communists came to power in 1949, they liberated the mainland from
foreign occupation and restored the sovereignty of a centralized state.
==========
2018 18:50:22
No society, of course, can live entirely without rules, and as the Communist Party
sought to stabilize and expand the economy in the 1950s, it began rebuilding law by
importing statutes from the Soviet Union.
==========
2018 18:51:37
Deng Xiaoping, was determined that Mao’s form of personal dictatorship must never
be allowed to occur again. The political reform process that unfolded subsequently
centered around the slow construction of a series of rules that would limit the
ability of any future charismatic leader to emerge and wreak havoc on the whole of
Chinese society in the manner of Mao. In addition, law was seen as a mechanism
==========
2018 18:51:41
Deng Xiaoping, was determined that Mao’s form of personal dictatorship must never
be allowed to occur again. The political reform process that unfolded subsequently
centered around the slow construction of a series of rules that would limit the
ability of any future charismatic leader to emerge and wreak havoc on the whole of
Chinese society in the manner of Mao.
==========
2018 18:53:15
dictatorship of the party over the state. Since Mao’s death in 1976 and the fall of
the so-called Gang
==========
2018 18:53:22
Since Mao’s death in 1976 and the fall of the so-called Gang of Four, there have
been new constitutions or major constitutional revisions promulgated in 1978, 1982,
1988, 1993, 1999, and 2004. These revisions largely reflected the shift to the
right and the opening toward a market economy that was taking place in the
political realm.
==========
2018 18:55:41
The contemporary Chinese constitution is built around two potentially contradictory

principles. On the one hand, Deng Xiaoping asserted in 1978 that “democracy has to
be institutionalized and written into law, so as to make sure that institutions and
laws do not change whenever the leadership changes, or whenever the leaders change
their views.”22 The Chinese constitution provides for an elected National People’s
Congress (NPC), which is held to be the “supreme organ of state power,” along with
people’s congresses at lower levels of government. The constitution further states
that the Communist Party must operate under its provisions and the law. China
scholar Kenneth Lieberthal notes that in the decades after 1978, the NPC has played
a greater role in policy deliberation and has passed “a remarkable corpus of formal
law” in areas not regarded as inherently political by the party. This contrasts
with the virtually lawless state of affairs under Mao.23 On the other hand, the
Four Fundamental Principles with which the constitution begins enshrine the
domination of the political system by the Communist Party, which in practice
exercises strict control over the government and legislature. No one has authority
to modify the constitution other than the party, and all existing constitutional
documents were rubber-stamped by NPCs with little discussion.
==========
2018 18:58:37
When the Deng-era reforms began, China faced a huge legal vacuum, especially in the
area of private or civil law. The desire to encourage economic growth and a market
economy has led to a rapid proliferation of new laws regarding contracts, joint
ventures, land use, insurance, arbitration, and the like.
==========
2018 19:01:03
Thus, in China’s booming real estate market, no one technically “owns” an apartment
or house. One owns the equivalent of a lease whose term extends up to seventy
years, which is acquired in exchange for land-use fees.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 422 | location 6460-6462 | Added on Saturday, 10 February
2018 21:21:21
During the Former Han Dynasty a couple of centuries before the birth of Jesus
Christ, a centralized government existed in China that had many of the
characteristics that Max Weber associated with modern bureaucracy.
==========
2018 21:22:05
weights and measures to promote commerce. The bureaucracy also sought to be

impersonal: for example, the
==========
2018 21:22:11
The bureaucracy also sought to be impersonal: for example, the central government
rotated officials in and out of provinces to make sure they did not develop close
family ties with the local population.
==========
2018 21:25:10
Most observers of modern China have focused on the economic policy shifts, without
paying attention to the political infrastructure that made those shifts possible.
==========
2018 21:26:02
In previous cases covered in this book, politicization of a bureaucracy has usually
meant capture of a state by politicians who want to use bureaucratic positions for
patronage purposes. This is what happened to the American state after the
Jacksonian revolution, and to the Greek and Italian states as they democratized and
opened themselves up to political competition.
==========
2018 21:26:34
In China, the state was colonized not by patronage politicians but by a disciplined
Leninist party that sought to subordinate it to its own ideological purposes.
Following the Bolshevik model, a Leninist party is built around an elite core whose
members are recruited into a strict hierarchy on the basis of ideological loyalty,
and a mass base that is used to penetrate the rest of the society. Before the
Cultural Revolution, party members constituted 2.5 percent of China’s
==========
2018 21:27:04
Cultural Revolution, party members constituted 2.5 percent of China’s total
population; today they number some 86 million members, or 6 percent of the total.
==========
2018 21:27:11
Cultural Revolution, party members constituted 2.5 percent of China’s total
population; today they number some 86 million members, or 6 percent of the total.
==========
2018 21:32:32
Mao launched the Cultural Revolution partly out of fear of the erosion of his
personal authority and partly due to opposition to the very principle of
bureaucratic government. In an effort to restore the zeal of the original
revolution, Mao bypassed all intermediate levels and connected his personal
authority directly to the “masses” through organization of local Revolutionary
Committees. Heads of different ministries would show up for work and find out that
their organizations had been taken over by their underlings. While Stalin made use
of the secret police under his personal control to purge the Soviet Communist Party
during the 1930s, Mao made use of the Revolutionary Committees and youthful Red
Guards to purge, execute, or send to the countryside party members. The PLA was
used arbitrarily in this period, sometimes to restore “discipline” and sometimes on
behalf of Revolutionary Committees.
==========
2018 21:37:13
The contemporary Chinese government is centralized, massive, and extraordinarily

complex. The party remains in control of the government, duplicating its
bureaucratic structure from top to bottom and overseeing activities at every level.
Nonetheless, party control began to retreat in the 1990s, and the nature of that
control has itself changed substantially.
==========
2018 21:39:39
While China remains a unitary rather than a federal state, provinces and cities
have been delegated substantial powers to implement directives from the center in
ways that they see fit. Thus there is considerable variation in policies across
China’s different regions. Southern provinces like Guangdong and cities like
Shenzhen are far more market-friendly than is, say, Beijing. Shenzhen has, for
example, privatized much of its municipal water supply to some twenty-six
companies, while municipal water in Beijing is still controlled by a single state-
owned company.
==========
2018 21:40:34
As a result, the bureaucratic structure of the central government is replicated at

the provincial and municipal levels, with each having the same functional division
of offices and party oversight agencies.
==========
2018 21:46:41
As political scientist Jean Oi has documented, the early gains were accomplished
not by the private sector but by so-called township and village enterprises (TVEs),
in which local governments essentially turned themselves into profit-making
businesses.
==========
2018 21:49:02
The TVE was not an institution that any orthodox U.S.-based economist would ever
have recommended. Operating behind a veil of ignorance in which outside observers
knew the characteristics of the system but not the actual country in question, most
would have predicted that it would become a sink of corruption and self-dealing.
Had Nigeria or Pakistan tried to implement such a system, one can imagine all sorts
of ways the TVEs would have been abused. The central governments would likely have
failed to impose hard budget constraints or reinvestment targets, allowing local
governments to impose more predatory levels of taxation and appropriate the entire
surplus. Or more likely, the higher levels of government would have colluded with
the lower ones to split the surplus, while using their rule-setting powers to favor
the state-owned businesses. But China is not Nigeria or Pakistan.
==========
2018 21:49:31
The central government was able to impose strict discipline on the TVEs in a way
that focused their attention on promoting long-term growth, in a manner similar to
the industrial policies set by other states in East Asia. When conditions changed,
the policy changed as well. The TVEs by the early 1990s had gotten rich, and the
profit-sharing system was plagued by high levels of outright corruption.
==========
2018 21:51:09
The emerging Chinese middle class that had provided the social basis for the
Tiananmen protests was thus increasingly co-opted into supporting the continuation
of Communist Party rule.
==========
2018 21:53:41
One of the biggest questions hanging over the future of China is the degree to
which the top levels of government can remain as autonomous as in the past. Minxin
Pei argues that the quality of government services has declined over time, in large
measure because subordinate units of the state have become too autonomous, or
rather, autonomous in the wrong way.
==========
2018 21:54:01
That is, they are able to protect their own political and economic positions
regardless of performance, and resist discipline from higher levels of the state
and party. These subunits include powerful state-owned enterprises like China
Telecom and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, which now rank among the
world’s largest corporations.
==========
2018 21:55:32
Any administrative system that relies so heavily on monetary incentives will invite
corruption. The Western economists predicting that it would lead to rent seeking
and corruption were not entirely wrong; they simply would not be able to predict
the degree of corruption, or the level of real services the government was able to
provide in return.
==========
2018 21:56:29
There continues to be a great deal of patronage, nepotism, factionalism, political

influence, and outright corruption pervading the Chinese political system. Minxin
Pei argues that China’s gradual political transition has resulted in a system of
“decentralized predation,” in which locally empowered officials throughout an
enormous government system take advantage of the opportunities provided by their
political control to extract a host of rents and bribes. Higher levels of the party
understand that pervasive corruption is strongly resented by ordinary people and
that the legitimacy of the party’s continued rule depends heavily on its ability to
control itself. The party has made numerous public commitments to control and
punish corruption. This happened most recently following the 18th Party Congress in
2012 in the early pronouncements of the new leadership of General Secretary Xi
Jinping and Wang Qishan, head of the Central Discipline Inspection Commission
responsible for rooting out corruption. But Pei argues that the monitoring capacity
of the party has been declining over time, as the government becomes larger and
more complex, and officials have more resources and more ways of hiding them.
==========
2018 21:58:45
When coupled with the government’s almost paranoid concern for social stability and
“harmony,” protests lead not simply to repression but also to significant
accommodation.
==========
2018 22:00:23
Rectification Office” to monitor the behavior of the eunuchs.

==========
2018 22:00:58
The vast majority of the rules, laws, and procedures that have been put in place in
post-Mao China are designed to regularize the behavior of lower levels of the
government and make them more responsive to higher ones.
==========
2018 22:03:16
Chinese authoritarian government faces several kinds of threats to the

sustainability of its system. First, it could produce a charismatic leader who
exploited populist passions and built a personal following that upset all of the
consensual understandings that have characterized the post-Mao leadership. There
are plenty of unaddressed social discontents on which to build, beginning with the
extremely high level of economic inequality in China and perceptions
==========
2018 22:03:30
An authoritarian system can move much more quickly and decisively than a democratic
one, but its success is ultimately dependent on having a continuing supply of good
leaders—good not just in a technocratic sense but in their commitment to shared
public goals rather than self-enrichment or personal power.
==========
2018 22:03:59
Even so, this system was not sufficient to prevent

==========
2018 22:04:02
Even so, this system was not sufficient to prevent the emergence of periodic bad
emperors who were alternately despotic, lazy, incompetent, or corrupt.
==========
2018 22:05:52
But the Chinese Communist Party still officially bases its legitimacy on an
imported Western ideology, Marxism-Leninism. This prevents it from fully and
forthrightly basing its legitimacy on traditional Chinese values.
==========
2018 22:07:34
been the dynamic force responsible for political change and, ultimately, democracy.
==========
2018 22:07:39
In many other societies, the middle class has been the dynamic force responsible
for political change and, ultimately, democracy.
==========
2018 20:17:54
Instead of subdividing labor further and further into simple tasks performed
repeatedly by specialized workers, a communally oriented factory would maintain a
maximum amount of flexibility in the way that it used its workers. Each worker
would be trained to do a number of different tasks and could be moved from
workstation to workstation depending on the day’s particular production needs.
Responsibility would be pushed as far down the production hierarchy as possible.
Rather than maintaining a rigid hierarchy of job classifications that established
firewalls between management and labor, a communally organized factory would
deemphasize status distinctions and permit a high degree of career mobility from
blue-collar to white-collar occupations. Work would be done by teams, in which (as
a result of multiple skills) workers could substitute for one another if the need
arose.
==========
2018 20:18:53
communally oriented workplace, by contrast, makes greater use of face-to-face

interactions and informal channels of communications to settle problems.
==========
2018 20:20:21
There is a tendency to rotate workers to different workstations as part of a

process of socialization. Thus, when a machinist gets sick or an emergency arises
on the production line, the group leader can shift workers from other jobs to fill
in without legal constraint.
==========
2018 20:21:02
French worker can get ahead only through job turnover, not by upgrading his or her
skills.
==========
2018 20:46:09
production line workers in Germany have a higher level of skill and technical
knowledge and are therefore able to operate their lines with a lesser degree of
managerial supervision than in Britain.
==========
2018 20:49:04
Achieving white-collar status means a leap in prestige and income, but also a new
social wall erected between oneself and one’s former colleagues.
==========
2018 20:54:31
The willingness of German managers to trust blue-collar workers with greater

responsibilities is closely related to the high level of worker skills in Germany,
and consequently to the apprenticeship system that has served to develop and
maintain them.
==========
2018 20:54:55
The German apprenticeship system has been credited with providing German industry
with the skill base needed to maintain its reputation for quality, as well as with
dampening rates of youth unemployment relative to other European countries.
==========
2018 20:56:02
Some seventy percent of all young Germans start their working careers as
apprentices; only ten percent of all Germans fail to pass through either an
apprenticeship or higher education.15 Training lasts two to three or more years,
during which the apprentice works at substantially reduced rates of pay.
==========
2018 20:56:31
sales clerk in a German department store will have received three years of
training; an American in a comparable position at JC Penney will have received
three days of on-the-job training.16
==========
2018 20:56:45
Part of the purpose of the training is to socialize young people into the rhythms
and requirements of work life, but they also receive training specific to a
particular trade, and at the end of the program the apprentice receives
certification by taking a detailed examination.
==========
2018 21:00:26
Given the likelihood of separation, it would seem that the temptation to free-ride
on other companies’ training programs would be strong.18 That this does not happen
to any large extent appears to be the product of several factors. First, the
program is nearly universal; even if a company loses a trainee in whom it has
invested time and effort, it is confident it can hire a comparably trained employee
from a different company. At the same time, the training is usually a mixture of
general and company specific; although comparable labor can be acquired externally,
there is an incentive for both company and trainee to stay together.
==========
2018 21:04:57
The most notable feature about German secondary education is tracking. After four
years of elementary schooling, students have to decide whether to enter one of
three tracks: the Hauptschule, the Realschule, or the Gymnasium.
==========
2018 21:07:51
In Germany, by contrast, working-class students know from a relatively early age

that they will not be going on to a university, but because the apprenticeship
system provides them with training and a professional qualification appropriate to
their skill level, they tend to regard themselves not as people who failed in the
general educational system but as ones who succeeded in a demanding vocational
training track.
==========
2018 21:08:05
the German vocational training system is such that training opportunities do not
end with the completion of an apprenticeship program. Beyond the basic
apprenticeship program has grown up a system of intermediate certifications that
allow older workers to increase their skill levels.
==========
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Jordan B. Peterson)
- Your Highlight on page 4 | location 48-49 | Added on Friday, 16 February 2018
12:32:33
After all, God didn’t give Moses “The Ten Suggestions,” he gave Commandments; and
if I’m a free agent, my first reaction to a command might just be that nobody, not
even God, tells me what to do, even if it’s good for me.
==========
12:32:52
And the story suggests something more: unchaperoned, and left to our own untutored
judgment, we are quick to aim low and worship qualities that are beneath us—in this
case, an artificial animal that brings out our own animal instincts in a completely
unregulated way.
==========
12:46:59
Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to

explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it.
Ideologues are people who pretend they know how to “make the world a better place”
before they’ve taken care of their own chaos within.
==========
12:48:37
Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous
when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match
for the complexity of existence.
==========
13:04:52
By contrast, our modern relativism begins by asserting that making judgments about
how to live is impossible, because there is no real good, and no true virtue (as
these too are relative). Thus relativism’s closest approximation to “virtue” is
“tolerance.” Only tolerance will provide social cohesion between different groups,
and save us from harming each other. On Facebook and other forms of social media,
therefore, you signal your so-called virtue, telling everyone how tolerant, open
and compassionate you are, and wait for likes to accumulate. (Leave aside that
telling people you’re virtuous isn’t a virtue, it’s self-promotion. Virtue
signalling is not virtue. Virtue signalling
==========
13:04:55
signalling is not virtue. Virtue signalling is, quite possibly, our commonest
vice.)
==========
13:20:16
signalling is not virtue. Virtue signalling is, quite possibly, our commonest
vice.)
==========
13:22:51
Where the relativist is filled with uncertainty, the ideologue is the very
opposite. He or she is hyper-judgmental and censorious, always knows what’s wrong
about others, and what to do about it. Sometimes it seems the only people willing
to give advice in a relativistic society are those with the least to offer.
==========
13:24:33
response (relativism, nihilism and ideology). When

==========
13:24:37
customs differed from place to place, and saw that the

==========
13:24:53
When the ancient Greeks sailed to India and elsewhere, they too discovered that
rules, morals and customs differed from place to place, and saw that the
explanation for what was right and wrong was often rooted in some ancestral
authority.
==========
13:25:55
He spent his life asking perplexing, foundational questions, such as “What is

virtue?” and “How can one live the good life?” and “What is justice?”
==========
13:42:31
“What’s the difference between being happy and being content?”, “What things get
better as you age?” and “What makes life more meaningful?”
==========
13:43:29
“What are the most valuable things everyone should know?”

==========
13:46:24
I noted that the nature of such meaning was constantly re-presented in the great
stories of the past, and that it had more to do with developing character in the
face of suffering than with happiness.
==========
13:49:41
famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail.fn1 Order is the white, masculine
serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the
white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things
seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when
everything seems lost,
==========
13:49:46
famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail.fn1 Order is the white, masculine
serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the
white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things
seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when
everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos.
==========
13:56:40
shared cultural system stabilizes human interaction, but is also a system of value—
a hierarchy of value, where some things are given priority and importance and
others are not. In the absence of such a system of value, people simply cannot act.
In fact, they can’t even perceive, because both action and perception require a
goal, and a valid goal is, by necessity, something valued. We experience much of
our positive emotion in relation to goals. We are not happy, technically speaking,
unless we see ourselves progressing—and the very idea of progression implies value.
Worse yet is the fact that the meaning of life without positive value is not simply
neutral. Because we are vulnerable and mortal, pain and anxiety are an integral
part of human existence. We must have something to set against the suffering that
is intrinsic to Being.
==========
13:58:36
my training as a clinical psychologist. Dreams

==========
13:58:42
Dreams shed light on the dim places where reason itself has yet to voyage. I
==========
14:03:20
We require routine and tradition. That’s order.

==========
14:03:36
good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown—and that is also not good. We need to
stay on the straight and narrow path.
==========
14:03:42
We require routine and tradition. That’s order. Order can become excessive, and
that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown—and that is also not good. We
need to stay on the straight and narrow path.
==========
16:11:25
a dominant lobster is badly defeated, its brain basically dissolves. Then it grows
a new, subordinate’s brain—one more appropriate to its new, lowly position.8 Its
original brain just isn’t sophisticated to manage the transformation from king to
bottom dog without virtually complete dissolution and regrowth.
==========
16:20:47
In consequence, males who stay on top longer are those who form reciprocal
coalitions with their lower-status compatriots, and who pay careful attention to
the troupe’s females and their infants.
==========
16:24:06
Mark Twain once said, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s
what we know
==========
16:24:15
what we know
==========
16:24:22
what we know
==========
16:24:31
what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
==========
16:31:20
Rich, modern city-dwellers, surrounded by hot, baking concrete, imagine the

environment as something pristine and paradisal,
==========
16:31:23
Rich, modern city-dwellers, surrounded by hot, baking concrete, imagine the

environment as something pristine and paradisal, like a French impressionist
landscape.
==========
16:31:36
Eco-activists, even more idealistic in their viewpoint, envision nature as

harmoniously balanced and perfect, absent the disruptions and depredations of
mankind.
==========
16:36:30
Low serotonin means decreased confidence. Low serotonin means more response to
stress and costlier physical preparedness for emergency—as anything whatsoever may
happen, at any time, at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy (and rarely something
good). Low serotonin means less happiness, more pain and anxiety, more illness, and
a shorter lifespan—among humans, just as among crustaceans.
==========
16:43:01
is for this reason that routine is so necessary. The acts of life we repeat every
day need to be automatized. They must be turned into stable and reliable habits, so
they lose their complexity and gain predictability and simplicity.
==========
19:25:27
Because we are so scientific now—and so determinedly materialistic—it is very

difficult for us even to understand that other ways of seeing can and do exist.
==========
2018 14:29:11
staggering brilliance—can hardly be overstated. It is through

==========
2018 14:29:17
is through such millennia-long exercise of the imagination that the idea of

abstracted moral concepts themselves, with all they entail, developed.
==========
2018 14:29:19

==========
2018 14:29:22

==========
2018 14:29:24

==========
2018 14:29:31
It is through such millennia-long exercise of the imagination that the idea of

==========
2018 14:59:25
Question for parents: do you want to make your children safe, or strong? In any
case, there’s a serpent
==========
2018 14:59:33
Question for parents: do you want to make your children safe, or strong?
==========
- Your Highlight on page 79 | location 1211-1212 | Added on Tuesday, 20 February
2018 20:30:05
Question for parents: do you want to make your children safe, or strong?
==========
2018 20:33:13
As the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov advised, “If there is a rifle hanging on
the wall in act one, it must be fired in the next act. Otherwise it has no business
being there.”
==========
2018 20:43:59
Naked means vulnerable and easily damaged. Naked means subject to judgment for
beauty and health. Naked means unprotected and unarmed in the jungle of nature and
man.
==========
2018 11:32:54
you can’t identify with that sentiment, you’re just not thinking. Beauty shames the
ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living—and the Ideal shames us
all.
==========
2018 11:44:53
Human beings have a great capacity for wrongdoing. It’s an attribute that is unique
in the world of life. We can and do make things worse, voluntarily, with full
knowledge of what we are doing (as well as accidentally, and carelessly, and in a
manner that is willfully blind). Given that terrible capacity, that proclivity for
malevolent actions, is it any wonder we have a hard time taking care of ourselves,
or others—or even that we doubt the value of the entire human enterprise?
==========
2018 11:55:42
learned two very important lessons from Carl Jung, the famous Swiss depth
psychologist, about “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” or
“loving your neighbour as yourself.” The first lesson was that neither of these
statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was that both are
equations, rather than injunctions. If I am someone’s friend, family member, or
lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on
theirs. If I fail to do so, I will end up a slave, and the other person a tyrant.
What good is that? It much better for any relationship when both partners are
strong.
==========
2018 12:01:32
Every time you give a child something sweet, you make that child happy. That does
not mean that you should do nothing for children except feed them candy. “Happy” is
by no means synonymous with “good.”
==========
2018 12:02:53
You must determine where you are going, so that you can bargain for yourself, so
that you don’t end up resentful, vengeful and cruel. You have to articulate your
own principles, so that you can defend yourself against others’ taking
inappropriate advantage of you, and so that
==========
2018 12:02:59
You must determine where you are going, so that you can bargain for yourself, so
that you don’t end up resentful, vengeful and cruel. You have to articulate your
own principles, so that you can defend yourself against others’ taking
inappropriate advantage of you, and so that you are secure and safe while you work
and play.
==========
2018 12:04:05
As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so

brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.”61
==========
2018 12:09:37
This movement was spearheaded by the traditional artisans, whose livelihoods were
being threatened by advancing industrialization.
==========
2018 12:27:15
Germans today work, on average, much less hard than the Japanese. Whatever the
strength of the traditional German Protestant work ethic celebrated by Max Weber,
the average German workweek in manufacturing has fallen to thirty-one hours,
compared to forty-two hours for Japan.
==========
2018 16:14:20
Cable TV, video games and internet did not exist. It was no easy matter to stay
innocently amused in Fairview, particularly during the five months of winter, when
long stretches of forty-below days and even colder nights were the norm. The world
is a different place when it’s cold like that. The drunks in our town ended their
sad lives early. They passed out in snowbanks at three in the morning and froze to
death. You don’t go outside casually when it’s forty below. On first breath, the
arid desert air constricts your lungs. Ice forms on your eyelashes and they stick
together. Long hair, wet from the shower, freezes solid and then stands on end
wraith-like of its own accord later in a warm house, when it thaws bone dry,
charged with electricity. Children only put their tongues on steel playground
equipment once. Smoke from house chimneys doesn’t rise. Defeated by the cold, it
drifts downwards, and collects like fog on snow-covered rooftops and yards. Cars
must be plugged in at night, their engines warmed by block heaters, or oil will not
flow through them in the morning, and they won’t start.
==========
2018 16:24:08
Plenty of us turned on and dropped out. But not so many tuned in.
==========
2018 16:27:40
Everything wasn’t online then, and thank God for that, but it was stored equally
indelibly in everyone’s spoken and unspoken expectations and memory.
==========
2018 16:28:51
I liked the anonymity that the city provided. I liked the new beginnings. I liked
the escape from the dismal, cramped adolescent culture of my home town. So, I
convinced my two friends to make the journey. But they did not have the same
experience.
==========
2018 16:32:30
People differ in intelligence, which is in large part the ability to learn and
transform.
==========
2018 16:34:26
Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when they
refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely
the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe that they
deserve any better—so they don’t go looking for it. Or, perhaps, they don’t want
the trouble of better. Freud called this a “repetition compulsion.” He thought of
it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past—sometimes, perhaps, to
formulate those horrors more precisely, sometimes to attempt more active mastery
and sometimes, perhaps, because no alternatives beckon.
==========
2018 18:22:34
You’re associating with people who are bad for you not because it’s better for
anyone, but because it’s easier. You know
==========
2018 18:26:51
Rogers believed it was impossible to convince someone to change for the better. The
desire to improve was, instead, the precondition for progress.
==========
2018 18:27:26
It might be just a person trying to look good pretending to solve what appears to
be a difficult problem instead of actually being good and addressing something
real.
==========
2018 18:29:31
When you dare aspire upward, you reveal the inadequacy of the present and the
promise of the future.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 118 | location 1807-1808 | Added on Sunday, 4 March 2018
09:50:53
You are either a success, a comprehensive, singular, over-all good thing, or its
opposite, a failure, a comprehensive, singular, irredeemably bad thing.
==========
09:52:41
You might object: I should be winning at everything! But winning at everything

might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult.
==========
09:55:08
When we are very young we are neither individual nor informed. We have not had the
time nor gained the wisdom to develop our own standards. In consequence, we must
compare ourselves to others, because standards are necessary. Without them, there
is nowhere to go and nothing to do. As we mature we become, by contrast,
increasingly individual and unique. The conditions of our lives become more and
more personal and less and less comparable with those of others. Symbolically
speaking, this means we must leave the house ruled by our father, and confront the
chaos of our individual Being.
==========
11:31:14
Do you negotiate fairly with yourself? Or are you a tyrant, with yourself as slave?
==========
16:41:06
denigrate
==========
16:42:34
A little careful kindness goes a long way, and judicious reward is a powerful
motivator.
==========
16:52:09
your life is not going well, perhaps it is your current knowledge that is
insufficient, not life itself.
==========
16:52:12
least that realization leaves you with some options. If your life is not going
well, perhaps it is your current knowledge that is insufficient, not life itself.
==========
16:52:16
If your life is not going well, perhaps it is your current knowledge that is
insufficient, not life itself.
==========
17:01:20
And you must be cautious, because making your life better means adopting a lot of
responsibility, and that takes more effort and care than living stupidly in pain
and remaining arrogant, deceitful and resentful.
==========
17:02:39
If we start aiming at something different—something like “I want my life to be

better”—our minds will start presenting us with new information, derived from the
previously hidden world, to aid us in that pursuit. Then we can put that
information to use and move, and act, and observe, and improve. And, after doing
so, after improving, we might pursue something different, or higher—something like,
“I want whatever might be better than just my life being better.” And then we enter
a more elevated and more complete reality.
==========
17:04:42
Religion is instead about proper behaviour. It’s about what Plato called “the
Good.”
==========
17:08:06
Everything you value is a product of unimaginably lengthy developmental processes,

personal, cultural and biological.
==========
17:08:15
You don’t understand how what you want—and, therefore, what you see—is conditioned
by the immense, abysmal, profound past.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 136 | location 2077-2078 | Added on Monday, 5 March 2018
16:38:57
That is all part of our attempts, individual and collective, to discover and
articulate what it is that we believe.
==========
16:42:45
a hungry lion reasonable, fair or just?

==========
18:01:44
You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the
other, someone who
==========
18:01:49
other, someone who can’t even set the clock on your microwave.
==========
18:01:59
other, someone who can’t even set the clock on your microwave. Don’t over-estimate
your self-knowledge.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 146 | location 2224-2225 | Added on Tuesday, 6 March 2018
08:43:45
cite Wikipedia because it is collectively written and edited and, therefore, the
perfect place to find accepted wisdom.)
==========
08:43:52
cite Wikipedia because it is collectively written and edited and, therefore, the
==========
08:43:56
(I cite Wikipedia because it is collectively written and edited and, therefore, the
==========
10:05:46
Our society faces the increasing call to deconstruct its stabilizing traditions to
include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into the
categories upon which even our perceptions are based.
==========
10:05:57
Each person’s private trouble cannot be solved by a social revolution, because
revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 227 | location 3467-3469 | Added on Friday, 9 March 2018
09:07:40
Occasionally I would look at the pictures, and each time I would think, “Good Lord,
what nonsense! This stuff is impossible to understand.” But it persistently
intrigued me, and I made up my mind to go into it more thoroughly.
==========
14:53:58
over vast stretches of time, and we do not understand with sufficient exactitude
why what we are doing works.
==========
14:55:35
It has been said that every individual is the conscious or unconscious follower of
some influential philosopher.
==========
16:17:51
modern parents are simply paralyzed by the fear that they will no longer be liked
or even loved by their children if they chastise them for any reason.
==========
16:17:58
or even loved by their children if they chastise them for any reason.
==========
16:18:01
They want their children’s friendship above all, and are willing to sacrifice
respect to get
==========
16:18:12
They want their children’s friendship above

==========
16:18:17
They want their children’s friendship above

==========
16:18:32
or even loved by their children if they chastise them for any reason. They want
their children’s friendship above all, and are willing to sacrifice respect to get
==========
16:18:39
it. This
==========
16:18:44
it.
==========
16:21:04
Observing the consequences of teasing and taunting enables chimp and child alike to
discover the limits of what might otherwise be a too-unstructured and terrifying
freedom.
==========
16:22:32
Imagine a toddler repeatedly striking his mother in the face. Why would he do such
a thing? It’s a stupid question. It’s unacceptably naive. The answer is obvious. To
dominate his mother. To see if he can get away with it. Violence, after all, is no
mystery. It’s peace that’s the mystery. Violence is the default.
==========
16:22:48
Imagine a toddler repeatedly striking his mother in the face. Why would he do such
a thing? It’s a stupid question. It’s unacceptably naive. The answer is obvious. To
dominate his mother. To see if he can get away with it. Violence, after all, is no
mystery. It’s peace that’s the mystery. Violence is the default. It’s easy. It’s
peace that is difficult: learned, inculcated, earned.
==========
08:23:37
Given this, the fundamental moral question is not how to shelter children
completely from misadventure and failure, so they never experience any fear or
pain, but how to maximize their learning so that useful knowledge may be gained
with minimal cost. In the Disney movie Sleeping Beauty, the King
==========
08:23:41
Given this, the fundamental moral question is not how to shelter children
completely from misadventure and failure, so they never experience any fear or
pain, but how to maximize their learning so that useful knowledge may be gained
with minimal cost.
==========
08:30:29
a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever
be difficult for him or her to make friends. The research literature is quite clear
on this.
==========
08:31:42
aimed at mutual betterment—or

==========
11:54:05
Limit the rules. Then, figure out what to do when one of them gets broken.
==========
11:55:09
The first: limit the rules. The second: Use the least force necessary to enforce
those rules.
==========
14:42:31
For starters, “hitting” is a very unsophisticated word to describe the disciplinary

act of an effective parent.
==========
14:51:32
Clear rules and proper discipline help the child, and the family, and society,
establish, maintain and expand the order that is all that protects us from chaos
and the terrors of the underworld, where everything is uncertain, anxiety-
provoking, hopeless and depressing. There are no greater gifts that a committed and
courageous parent can bestow. Do not let your children do anything that makes you
dislike them.
==========
16:05:53
Tolstoy could identify only four means of escaping from such thoughts. One was
retreating into childlike ignorance of the problem. Another was pursuing mindless
pleasure. The third was “continuing to drag out a life that is evil and
meaningless, knowing beforehand that nothing can come of it.”
==========
08:16:19
It’s a forceful, terrible book, written with the overwhelming moral force of
unvarnished truth.
==========
08:19:08
Corruption raises its ugly head. The increasingly hubristic state becomes obsessed
with power, begins to forget its duty to the widows and orphans, and deviates from
its age-old agreement with
==========
08:19:14
its age-old agreement with God. A
==========
08:19:18
its age-old agreement with God. A prophet arises. He brazenly and publicly reviles
==========
08:19:29
with power, begins to forget its duty to the widows and orphans, and
==========
08:19:33
with power, begins to forget its duty to the widows and orphans, and
==========
08:19:38
its age-old agreement with God.
==========
08:21:35
hurricane is an act of God. But failure to prepare, when the necessity for
preparation is well known—that’s
==========
08:21:38
preparation is well known—that’s sin. That’s
==========
08:21:43
preparation is well known—that’s sin.
==========
08:21:52
A hurricane is an act of God. But failure to prepare, when the necessity for
preparation is well known—that’s sin.
==========
08:24:19
You can use your own standards of judgment. You can rely on yourself for guidance.
You don’t have to adhere to some external, arbitrary code of behaviour (although
you should not overlook the guidelines of your culture. Life is short, and you
don’t have time to figure everything out on your own. The wisdom of the past was
hard-earned, and your dead ancestors may have something useful to tell you).
==========
08:24:42
you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?
==========
08:24:47
If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?
==========
16:11:38
Our ancestors worked out very sophisticated answers to such questions, but we still
don’t understand them very well. This is because they are in large part still
implicit—manifest primarily in ritual and myth and, as of yet, incompletely
articulated.
==========
16:17:39
There are similar long journeys between every leap in sophistication with regard to
delay and its conceptualization: short-term sharing, storing away for the future,
representation of that storage in the form of records and, later, in the form of
currency—and, ultimately, the saving of money in a bank or other social
institution.
==========
16:19:52
Cain and Abel are really the first humans, since their parents were made directly
by God, and not born in the standard manner. Cain and Abel live in history, not in
Eden.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 199 | location 3044-3045 | Added on Wednesday, 21 March
2018 08:53:58
Not all sacrifices are of equal quality.

==========
2018 08:56:07
In such a manner, “mammoth” becomes “future mammoth,” and “future mammoth” becomes
“personal reputation.” That’s the emergence of the social contract.
==========
2018 08:57:05
To share means, properly, to initiate the process of trade. A child who can’t share
—who can’t trade—can’t have any friends, because having friends is a form of trade.
Benjamin Franklin once suggested that a newcomer to a neighbourhood ask a new
neighbour to do him or her a favour, citing an old maxim: He that has once done you
a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have
obliged.117 In Franklin’s opinion, asking someone for something (not too extreme,
obviously) was the most useful and immediate invitation to social interaction.
==========
2018 08:58:29
First were the endless tens or hundreds of thousands of years prior to the
emergence of written history and drama. During this time, the twin practices of
delay and exchange begin to emerge, slowly and painfully. Then they become
represented, in metaphorical abstraction, as rituals and tales of sacrifice, told
in a manner such as this: “It’s as if there is a powerful Figure in the Sky, who
sees all, and is judging you.
==========
2018 23:26:06
you want, therefore, it’s time to examine your values. It’s time to rid yourself of
your current presuppositions. It’s time to let go. It might even be time to
sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead
of staying who you are.
==========
2018 23:27:20
Something valuable, given up, ensures future prosperity. Something valuable,

sacrificed, pleases the Lord.
==========
2018 23:31:39
Thus, the person who wishes to alleviate suffering—who wishes to rectify the flaws
in Being; who wants to bring about the best of all possible futures; who wants to
create Heaven on Earth—will make the greatest of sacrifices, of self and child, of
everything that is loved, to live a life aimed at the Good.
==========
2018 23:35:52
If you cease to utter falsehoods and live according to the dictates of your
conscience, you can maintain your nobility, even when facing the ultimate threat;
if you abide, truthfully and courageously, by the highest of ideals, you will be
provided with more security and strength than will be offered by any short-sighted
concentration on your own safety; if you live properly, fully, you can discover
meaning so profound that it protects you even from the fear of death.
==========
2018 23:38:38
this: once you become consciously aware that you, yourself, are vulnerable, you
understand the nature of human vulnerability, in general. You understand what it’s
like to be fearful, and angry, and resentful, and bitter. You understand what pain
means. And once you truly understand such feelings in yourself, and how they’re
produced, you understand how to produce them in others. It is in this manner that
the self-conscious beings that we are become voluntarily and exquisitely capable of
tormenting others (and ourselves, of course—but it’s the others we are concerned
about right now).
==========
2018 23:42:44
bad. I have seen evidence of this repeatedly in my private life, in my work as a

professor, and in my role as a clinical practitioner.
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2018 08:17:51
is in such a manner that the objective and subjective worlds come crashing,
synchronistically, together.
==========
2018 08:18:03
the wilderness might take you exactly to that place. It is in such a manner that
the objective and subjective worlds come crashing, synchronistically, together.
==========
2018 08:18:08
It is in such a manner that the objective and subjective worlds come crashing,
synchronistically, together.
==========
2018 08:21:09
“No tree can grow to Heaven,” adds the ever-terrifying Carl Gustav Jung,
psychoanalyst extraordinaire, “unless its roots reach down to Hell.”
==========
14:42:07
If a father disciplines his son properly, he obviously interferes with his freedom,
particularly in the here-and-now. He put limits on the voluntary expression of his
son’s Being. forcing him to take his place as a socialized member of the world.
Such a father requires that all that childish potential be funneled down a singly
pathway. In placing such limitations on his son, he might be considered a
destructive force, acting as he does to replace the miraculous plurality of
childhood with a single narrow actuality. But if the father does not take such
action, he merely lets his son remain Peter Pan, the eternal Boy, King of the Lost
Boys, Ruler of the non-existent Neverland.
==========
14:23:09
We rebel against our own totalitarianism, as much as that of others. I cannot

merely order myself to action, and neither can you. “I will stop procrastinating,”
I say, but I don’t. “I will eat properly,” I say, but I don’t. “I will end my
drunken misbehavior,” I say, but I don’t. I cannot merely make myself over in the
image constructed by my intellect (particularly if that intellect is possessed by
an ideology). I have a nature, and so do you, and so do we all. We must discover
that nature, and contend with it, before making peace with ourselves. What is it,
that we most truly are? What is it that we could most truly become, knowing who we
most truly are? We must get to the very bottom of things before such questions can
be truly answered.
==========
14:27:13
The internet is a graveyard of dead facts. But an idea that grips a person is
alive. It wants to express itself, to live in the world.
==========
14:27:52
An idea is a personality, not a fact.
==========
14:30:51
Recovering addicts cursed with money blow it all in a frenzy of snorting and
drunkenness. And boredom weighs heavily on people who have nothing to
==========
14:30:56
drunkenness. And boredom weighs
==========
14:31:00
drunkenness. And boredom weighs heavily on people who have nothing to do.
==========
14:35:07
moral conclusions. Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don’t be arrogant
in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself
in intolerance, oppression, torture and death. Become aware of your own
insufficiency—your cowardice, malevolence, resentment and hatred. Consider the
murderousness of your own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you
attempt to repair the fabric of the world. Maybe it’s not the world that’s at
fault. Maybe it’s you. You’ve failed to make the mark. You’ve missed the target.
You’ve fallen short of the glory of God. You’ve sinned. And all of that is your
contribution to the insufficiency and evil of the world. And, above all, don’t lie.
Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell.
==========
14:40:03
have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want, because you may
neither know what you want, nor what you truly need.
==========
14:52:44
Meaning is when everything there is comes together in an ecstatic dance of single

purpose—the glorification of a reality so that no matter how good it has suddenly
become, it can get better and better and better more and more deeply forever into
the future.
==========
16:19:11
We had temporarily entered a kind of no-man’s-land, in which society offers no
ground rules or guidance.
==========
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16:48:18
==========
17:09:59
When you explore boldly, when you voluntarily confront the unknown, you gather
information and build your renewed self out of that information.
==========
17:13:46
You remember the old joke: insanity is doing the same thing over and over while
expecting different results.
==========
17:22:59
With love, encouragement, and character intact, a human being can be resilient
beyond imagining. What cannot be borne, however, is the absolute ruin produced by
tragedy and deception.
==========
11:42:18
Culture is always in a near-dead state, even though it was established by the

spirit of great people in the past. But the present is not the past. The wisdom of
the past thus deteriorates, or becomes outdated, in proportion to the genuine
difference between the conditions of the present and the past. That is a mere
consequence of the passage of time, and the change that passage inevitably brings.
But it is also the case that culture and its wisdom is additionally vulnerable to
corruption—to voluntary, willful blindness and Mephistophelean intrigue. Thus, the
inevitable functional decline of the institutions granted to us by our ancestors is
sped along by our misbehavior—our
==========
11:42:22

sped along by our misbehavior—our missing of the mark—in the present.
==========
11:42:25

sped along by our misbehavior—our missing of the mark—in the present.
==========
11:45:32
Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a
previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as
something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us. In such cases, we
might never recover or, if we do, we change a lot.
==========
11:46:38
Articulate your experience as clearly and carefully to yourself and others as you
possibly can. In this manner, you will learn to proceed more effectively and
efficiently towards your goal.
==========
11:52:07
If existence is good, then the clearest and cleanest and most correct relationship
with it is also good. If existence is not good, by contrast, you’re lost.
==========
11:59:22
When the lies get big enough, the whole world spoils. But if you look close enough,
the biggest of lies is composed of smaller lies, and those are composed of still
smaller lies—and the smallest of lies is where the big lie starts.
==========
12:00:26
First, a little lie; then, several little lies to prop it up. After that, distorted
thinking to avoid the shame that those lies produce, then a few more lies to cover
up the consequences of the distorted thinking. Then, most terribly, the
transformation of those now necessary lies through practice into automatized,
specialized, structural, neurologically instantiated “unconscious” belief and
action. Then the sickening of experience itself as action predicated on falsehood
fails to produce the results intended.
==========
16:06:53
Psychotherapy is not advice. Advice is what you get when the person you’re talking
with about something horrible and complicated wishes you would just shut up and go
away. Advice is what you get when the person you are talking to wants to revel in
the superiority of his or her own intelligence. If you weren’t so stupid, after
all, you wouldn’t have your stupid problems. Psychotherapy is genuine conversation.
==========
16:20:20
And sometimes what they remember never happened, and the people accused are
innocent. The good news? At least the therapist’s theory remains intact. That’s
good—for the therapist. But there’s no shortage of collateral damage. However,
people are often willing to produce a lot of collateral damage if they can retain
their theory.
==========
16:24:10
Memory is the past’s guide to the future. If you remember that something bad
happened, and you can figure out why, then you can try to avoid that bad thing
happening again. That’s the purpose of memory. It’s not “to remember the past.”
It’s to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over.
==========
18:39:13
True thinking is rare—just like true listening. Thinking

==========
18:39:21
True thinking is rare—just like true listening. Thinking is listening to yourself.

It’s difficult. To think, you have to be at least two people at the same
==========
18:39:31
True thinking is rare—just like true listening. Thinking is listening to yourself.

It’s difficult. To think, you have to be at least two people at the same time. Then
you have to let those people disagree. Thinking is an internal dialogue between two
or more different views of the world.
==========
18:49:18
people. A good therapist will tell you the truth about what he thinks. (That is not
the same thing as telling you that what he thinks is the truth.)
==========
18:49:22
good therapist will tell you the truth about what he thinks. (That is not the same
thing as telling you that what he thinks is the truth.)
==========
18:49:28
people. A therapist is one of those other people. A good therapist will tell you
the truth about what he thinks. (That is not the same thing as telling you that
what he thinks is the truth.)
==========
18:49:33
A good therapist will tell you the truth about what he thinks. (That is not the
same thing as telling you that what he thinks is the truth.)
==========
18:53:59
This is partly because talking (and thinking) is often more about forgetting than
about remembering. To discuss an event, particularly
==========
18:54:03
This is partly because talking (and thinking) is often more about forgetting than
about remembering.
==========
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19:02:47
==========
2018 08:49:21
It maintains its function only because a vast array of other technologies are
currently and harmoniously at play. It is fed, for example, by a power grid whose
function is invisibly dependent on the stability of a myriad of complex physical,
==========
2018 08:49:28
It maintains its function only because a vast array of other technologies are
currently and harmoniously at play. It is fed, for example, by a power grid whose
function is invisibly dependent on the stability of a myriad of complex physical,
biological, economic and interpersonal systems.
==========
2018 08:52:35
Our evolved perceptual systems transform the interconnected, complex multi-level

world that we inhabit not so much into things per se as into useful things (or
their nemeses, things that get in the way).
==========
2018 10:44:21
To the degree that we are patriotic, similarly, our country is not just important
to us. It is us. We might even sacrifice our entire smaller individual selves, in
battle, to maintain the integrity of our country. For much of history, such
willingness to die has been regarded as something admirable and courageous, as a
part of human duty. Paradoxically, that is a direct consequence not of our
aggression but of our extreme sociability and willingness to cooperate. If we can
become not only ourselves, but our families, teams and countries, cooperation comes
easily to us, relying on the same deeply innate mechanisms that drive us (and other
creatures) to protect our very bodies.
==========
09:14:44
That’s a consequence of emergent uncertainty.

==========
09:22:31
The limitations of all our perceptions of things and selves manifest themselves
when something we can usually depend on in our simplified world breaks down. Then
the more complex world that was always there, invisible and conveniently ignored,
makes its presence known.
==========
09:24:27
First, something—someone—emerges in his stead: a complex, frightening stranger.

==========
09:36:18
there exist only three difficult options: slavery, tyranny or negotiation.

==========
09:42:19
That’s a gratifying myth to live by, even if unconsciously chosen (the truth of the
situation be damned).
==========
09:44:39
Why remain vague, when it renders life stagnant and murky?

==========
09:45:13
But not thinking about something you don’t want to know about doesn’t make it go
away. You are merely trading specific, particular, pointed knowledge of the likely
finite list of your real faults and flaws for a much longer list of undefined
potential inadequacies and insufficiencies.
==========
10:38:35
was specific things that fell apart, not everything; identifiable beliefs failed;
particular actions were false and inauthentic. What were they? How can they be
fixed, now?
==========
10:42:15
“I’m unhappy,” is a good start (not “I have a right to be unhappy,” because that is
still questionable, at the beginning of the problem-solving process).
==========
12:15:25
It is very difficult to put such things in order—but damaged machinery will

continue to malfunction if its problems are neither diagnosed nor fixed.
==========
16:41:14
When someone claims to be acting from the highest principles, for the good of
others, there is no reason to assume that the person’s motives are genuine.
==========
16:41:24
People motivated to make things better usually aren’t concerned with changing other
people—or, if they are, they take responsibility for making the same changes to
themselves (and first).
==========
12:01:16
It was the product of a psyche and a body that did not operate harmoniously.
==========
12:16:17
There is a chronic shortage of excellent people, regardless of sex, and law firms
are desperate to retain them.
==========
12:22:05
Culture takes with one hand, but in some fortunate places it gives more with the
other.
==========
12:42:49
Society was no longer repression of the poor by the rich. It was oppression of
everyone by the powerful.
==========
12:46:18
Although the facts cannot speak for themselves (just as an expanse of land spread
out before a voyager cannot tell him how to journey through it), and although there
are a myriad ways to interact with—even to perceive—even a small number of objects,
that does not mean that all interpretations are equally valid.
==========
12:48:26
believe that government can, sometimes, be a force for good, as well as the
necessary arbiter of a small set of necessary rules.
==========
13:30:25
The introduction of the “equal pay for equal work” argument immediately complicates
even salary comparison beyond practicality, for one simple reason: who decides what
work is equal? It’s not possible. That’s why the marketplace exists.
==========
13:31:21
On the surface, that’s a noble, compassionate, fair claim.

==========
13:34:45
In consequence, everyone is a brainwashed victim, wherever gender differences

exist, and the rigorous critical theoretician is morally obligated to set them
straight. This means that those already equity-minded Scandinavian males, who
aren’t much into nursing, require even more retraining. The same goes, in
principle, for Scandinavian females, who aren’t much into engineering.193 What
might such retraining look like? Where might its limits lie? Such things are often
pushed past any reasonable limit before they are discontinued. Mao’s murderous
Cultural Revolution should have taught us that.
==========
13:41:32
You must also know clearly what you want out of the situation, and be prepared to
clearly articulate your desire. It’s a good idea to tell the person you are
confronting exactly what you would like them to do instead of what they have done
or currently are doing. You might think, “if they loved me, they would know what to
do.” That’s the voice of resentment. Assume ignorance before malevolence. No one
has a direct pipeline to your wants and needs—not even you. If you try to determine
exactly what you want, you might find that it is more difficult than you think. The
person oppressing you is likely no wiser than you, especially about you. Tell them
directly what would be preferable, instead, after you have sorted it out. Make your
request as small and reasonable as possible—but ensure that its fulfillment would
satisfy you. In that manner, you come to the discussion with a solution, instead of
just a problem.
==========
13:45:00
Too much protection devastates the developing soul.

==========
15:08:00
A woman should look after her children—although that is not all she should do. And
a man should look after a woman and children—although that is not all he should do.
But a woman should not look after a man, because she must look
==========
15:08:06
But a woman should not look after a man, because she must look after children, and
a man should not be a child. This means that he must not be dependent.
==========
15:08:13
But a woman should not look after a man, because she must look after children, and
a man should not be a child.
==========
15:10:08
Partly what this means for the future is that if men are pushed too hard to
feminize, they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political
ideology.
==========
2018 08:47:56
Cooperation is for safety, security and companionship. Competition is for personal
growth and status.
==========
2018 08:50:35
Tragedy at such a time seems particularly unfair. It is the sort of thing that can
make you distrust even hope itself.
==========
2018 08:54:02
It’s a question of absolutely fundamental import, for believer and non-believer

alike.
==========
2018 09:01:15
Imagine a Being who is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. What does such a
Being lack?211 The answer? Limitation.
==========
2018 09:01:18
Imagine a Being who is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. What does such a
Being lack?211 The answer? Limitation.
==========
2018 09:53:21
Set aside some time to talk and to think about the illness or other crisis and how
it should be managed every day. Do not talk or think about it otherwise. If you do
not limit its effect, you will become exhausted, and everything will spiral into
the ground. This is not helpful. Conserve your strength. You’re in a war, not a
battle, and a war is composed of many battles. You must stay functional through all
of them. When worries associated with the crisis arise at other times, remind
yourself that you will think them through, during the scheduled period. This
usually works. The parts of your brain that generate anxiety are more interested in
the fact that there is a plan than in the details of the plan. Don’t schedule your
time to think in the evening or at night. Then you won’t be able to sleep. If you
can’t sleep, then everything will go rapidly downhill.
==========
2018 09:56:10
Maybe I shouldn’t laugh at cats, but it’s hard to resist. The fact that they can be
startled is one of the best things about them (along with the fact that they are
instantly disgruntled and embarrassed by their overreaction).
==========
2018 10:27:54
My wife and I learned that if you ask yourself such a question, and you genuinely
desire the answer (no matter how disgraceful and terrible and shameful), then a
memory of something you did that was stupid and wrong at some point in the
generally not-distant-enough past will arise from the depths of your mind. Then you
can go back to your partner and reveal why you’re an idiot, and apologize
(sincerely) and that person can do the same for you, and then apologize
(sincerely), and then you two idiots will be able to talk again.
==========
2018 10:30:43
The next question ended the first set: What shall I do with my life?
==========
2018 10:30:47
The next question ended the first set: What shall I do with my life? Aim for
Paradise, and concentrate on today.
==========
2018 10:32:43
What shall I do with my parents? Act such that your actions justify the suffering
they endured.
==========
2018 10:56:59
What shall I do with the fact of aging? Replace the potential of my youth with the
accomplishments of my maturity.
==========
11:08:26
What is it about this dysfunctional business of maps and directions? One long-time
China hand told me he thinks the vagueness is connected to the deep-seated sense of
face: the Chinese find it very personally difficult to say boldly and simply “I
don’t know” when they don’t know an answer.
==========
11:08:38
What is it about this dysfunctional business of maps and directions? One long-time
China hand told me he thinks the vagueness is connected to the deep-seated sense of
face: the Chinese find it very personally difficult to say boldly and simply “I
don’t know” when they don’t know an answer. They are more comfortable—and can save
face—by demurring and offering some vague noncommittal response. This explanation
made sense to me, although I would have much preferred to hear a straightforward “I
don’t know” than be sent off frequently on a wild-goose chase.
==========
11:10:06
She said, “If you ask someone where their home town is, they’ll say it is seven
hours by bus. Or four hours by train. They won’t tell you where it
==========
2018 11:12:40
may surprise some people that per capita income is higher overall in Latin America
than in East Asia. That is due to the existence of a number of large, relatively
poor countries in the latter region such as Indonesia and the Philippines, and the
fact that China, while a star performer in many ways, still has a large,
impoverished rural population.
==========
2018 11:29:48
Latin America’s development path was very different. There was no equivalent of the
French Revolution to unseat old oligarchies, nor was there prolonged international
competition to stimulate the formation of modern states. National identities
remained weak, due to ethnic diversity and slow or absent industrialization, which
meant that conflict was more often an internal one between classes rather than an
external one between nations.
==========
2018 12:27:17
Many of the countries of Southeast Asia have had very different political
development trajectories. As noted in chapter 22, Indonesia did not even exist as a
state in the nineteenth century and was nearly as fragmented ethnically as Nigeria.
==========
2018 12:27:41
Singapore and Malaysia were direct creations of British colonialism, whose modern
success did not depend on the existence of precolonial indigenous states.
==========
2018 12:32:41
While European liberal democracy grew out of a rough balance of power between state
and society, the state-society balance in East Asia favored the state. This meant
that, in contrast to most of the rest of the developing world where state weakness
was the central issue, what is lacking in East Asia is the limitation of state
power through law or political accountability.
==========
2018 12:33:50
Goods and services, people, and ideas travel across international boundaries much
more readily than they once did, which makes foreign actors far more important to
the process of domestic development.
==========
2018 12:33:57
if East Asian states were traditionally strong, they today face both resistance
from new groups in their own societies and the influx of ideas from other parts of
the world.
==========
Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (Edward Abbey)
15:56:17
Solitaire The Serpents of Paradise Cliffrose and Bayonets

==========
15:59:33
Water The Heat of Noon: Rock and Tree and Cloud The Moon-Eyed Horse Down the River
Havasu The Dead Man at Grandview Point Tukuhnikivats, the Island in the Desert
Episodes and Visions Terra Incognita: Into the Maze Bedrock and Paradox AUTHOR’S
==========
2018 17:06:54
Democracy has become the dominant form of political organization around the world
not just because it is a good idea, but also because it serves the interests of and
is promoted by certain social groups.
==========
2018 17:10:24
Between 1970 and 2010, the number of democracies around the world increased from
about 35 to nearly 120, or some 60 percent of the world’s countries, in what Samuel
Huntington called the Third Wave of democratization.
==========
12:37:43
Why, for instance, do the ideas of human equality or democracy take off in some
periods and not in others?
==========
12:37:58
Tocqueville does not explain why the idea of human equality became progressively
more powerful, except to suggest that it was an act of God.
==========
12:39:20
An alternative school of thought understands democracy not as the expression of an

idea or a set of cultural values but as the by-product of deep structural forces
within societies.
==========
12:44:02
Although Smith himself never made this argument explicitly, it follows logically
that these new groups, excluded from participation in the political institutions of
the old agrarian society, would demand a share of political power and therefore
increase pressures for democracy. Economic growth, in other words, engendered
social mobilization,
==========
12:44:10
social mobilization, which in turn
==========
12:44:18
social mobilization, which in turn
==========
12:44:23
social mobilization, which in turn led to increasing demands for political
participation (along the lines of Figure 20).
==========
09:29:04
Each of these three classes wanted a different political outcome: the traditional
landowning class wanted to preserve the old authoritarian order; the bourgeoisie
wanted a liberal (i.e., rule of law) regime protecting their property rights that
might or might not include formal electoral democracy (they were always more
interested in the rule of law than in democracy); and the proletariat, once it
achieved consciousness of itself as a class, wanted a dictatorship of the
proletariat, which would in turn socialize the means of production, abolish private
property, and redistribute wealth.
==========
09:29:53
In Germany, for example, the industrial bourgeoisie allied itself with the
autocratic Junker landowning aristocracy in the famous marriage of “iron and rye”
==========
09:35:06
For example, the bourgeoisie is far from being a unified group. It includes large
industrialists like the Thyssens and Rockefellers as well as small shopkeepers and
urban professionals that the Marxists frequently referred to contemptuously as
“petty bourgeois.”
==========
09:35:16
middle-class groups did not invariably support democracy.

==========
09:35:35
It is important to note that the two components of liberal democracy—liberal rule

of law and mass political participation—are separable political goals that
initially tended to be favored by different social groups.
==========
09:38:03
Liberal democracy—a political system embodying both rule of law and universal
suffrage—thus evolved into a single package desired by both middle-class groups and
a significant part of the working class.
==========
09:39:31
Barrington Moore was not himself a Marxist in the sense of wanting to see the
victory of communism around the world.
==========
09:40:44
the strength of the middle class relative to other social groups that prefer other
forms of government, such as the old landed oligarchy who are inclined to support
authoritarian systems, or radicalized groups of peasants or urban poor who are
focused on economic redistribution.
==========
09:43:50
The peasantry had complicated and sometimes inconsistent political aspirations. In

many societies they were an extremely conservative group, embracing traditional
social values and willing to live in subordinate positions as clients of the
landowning class.
==========
09:45:31
the proletariat, feudalists—were clearly defined political actors capable of

purposive rational decision making. In reality, social classes are intellectual
abstractions, useful analytically but incapable of producing political action
unless they are embodied in specific organizations.
==========
09:47:47
A central problem with any simple class-based analysis of democratization is that

there were a number of cross-cutting issues that united people across class lines
and blurred the class profiles of political parties.
==========
09:49:50
Political parties are created by political entrepreneurs who organize followings

around particular ideas and who then go on to organize real-world political
machines.
==========
09:51:14
Clientelistic party organization often went hand in hand with a personalistic

political style, in which supporters were rallied around particular charismatic
individuals like Juan and Eva Perón rather than around a coherent program.
==========
10:05:40
Accountability was the result of what seems in retrospect to be the almost

accidental survival of a feudal institution, the medieval estate or parliament,
into the modern era.
==========
10:07:15
Accountable government, by contrast, means formal recognition of the principle of

accountability to a broader public and the legitimacy of opposition.
==========
10:08:25
The shift in understanding from the “rights of Englishmen” (that is, traditional
feudal rights) to “natural rights” (universal rights held by all human beings)
meant that these new revolutions would never simply be about the displacement of
one elite group by another.
==========
10:08:58
Those sitting in Parliament were elected by a small, well-to-do part of the

country, no more than 3 percent of the whole population as late as 1830.
==========
10:14:54
“1848 appears as the one revolution in the modern history of Europe which combines
the greatest promise, the widest scope, and the most immediate initial success,
with the most unqualified and rapid failure.”
==========
10:15:48
The brisk spread of revolutionary ideas demonstrates that the “contagion effect” of
democratic awakenings was not the by-product of the Internet and social media but
could occur in an age of newspapers as well.
==========
10:20:50
As elites, they were willing to let themselves “represent” the nation without
actually wanting to give their fellow citizens the right to vote.
==========
10:22:13
Mill therefore believed it was better to impose direct rather than indirect taxes,
since that would remind citizens of their obligations to be vigilant about how the
government spent their money.
==========
10:22:27
In other words, people on welfare should not have the right to vote, since they
were essentially freeloading off of taxpayers.
==========
10:25:35
Gaetano Mosca, who stated that the different regime types—monarchy, aristocracy,
democracy—made little difference to actual life because all were in the end
controlled by elites.
==========
14:58:46
Marx
==========
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (Steven
Pinker)
08:16:22
But the most arresting question

==========
Pinker)
08:16:52
The student’s ingenuous tone made it clear that she was neither suicidal nor
sarcastic but genuinely curious about how to find meaning and purpose if
traditional religious beliefs about an immortal soul are undermined by our best
science.
==========
Pinker)
08:18:30
In the very act of asking that question, you are seeking reasons for your
convictions, and so you are committed to reason as the means to discover and
justify what is important to you. And there are so many reasons to live! As a
sentient being, you have the potential to flourish. You can refine your faculty of
reason itself by learning and debating. You can seek explanations of the natural
world through science, and insight into the human condition through the arts and
humanities. You can make the most of your capacity for pleasure and satisfaction,
which allowed your ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed you to exist. You can
appreciate the beauty and richness of the natural and cultural world. As the heir
to billions of years of life perpetuating itself, you can perpetuate life in turn.
You have been endowed with a sense of sympathy—the ability to like, love, respect,
help, and show kindness—and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with
friends, family, and colleagues. And because reason tells you that none of this is
particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others what you expect
for yourself. You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing
life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. History
shows that when we sympathize with others and apply our ingenuity to improving the
human condition, we can make progress in doing so, and you can help to continue
that progress.
==========
Pinker)
08:24:35
Deutsch argues that if we dare to understand, progress is possible in all fields,

scientific, political, and moral:
==========
Pinker)
08:24:47
that all failures—all evils—are due to insufficient knowledge. . . .

==========
Pinker)
08:27:50
If there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence
that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and
not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority,
charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing
of sacred texts.
==========
Pinker)
08:28:17
that natural events unfolded with no regard to human welfare,

==========
Pinker)
08:29:03
Some were deists (as opposed to theists): they thought that God set the universe in
motion and then stepped back, allowing it to unfold according to the laws of
nature.
==========
Pinker)
08:31:33
The sociologist Robert Scott notes that in the Middle Ages “the belief that an
external force controlled daily life contributed to a kind of collective paranoia”:
Rainstorms, thunder, lightning, wind gusts, solar or lunar eclipses, cold snaps,
heat waves, dry spells, and earthquakes alike were considered signs and signals of
God’s displeasure.
==========
Pinker)
08:31:42
The sociologist Robert Scott notes that in the Middle Ages “the belief that an
external force controlled daily life contributed to a kind of collective paranoia”:
==========
Pinker)
10:20:46
the glory of the tribe, race, nation, or religion. It is individuals, not groups,
who are sentient—who feel pleasure and pain, fulfillment and anguish. Whether it is
framed as the goal of providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number or
as a categorical imperative to treat people as ends rather than means, it
==========
Pinker)
10:23:44
If we keep track of how our laws and manners are doing, think up ways to improve
them, try them out, and keep the ones that make people better off, we can gradually
make the world a better place.
==========
Pinker)
10:24:24
Starting from a “clean tablecloth,” the modernists designed urban renewal projects
that replaced vibrant neighborhoods with freeways, high-rises, windswept plazas,
and brutalist architecture.
==========
Pinker)
10:24:58
Though these developments were sometimes linked to the word progress, the usage was
ironic: “progress” unguided by humanism is not progress.
==========
Pinker)
10:25:44
In this way of thinking, government is not a divine fiat to reign, a synonym for
“society,” or an avatar of the national, religious, or racial soul. It is a human
invention, tacitly agreed to in a social contract, designed to enhance the welfare
of citizens by coordinating their behavior and discouraging selfish acts that may
be tempting to every individual but leave everyone worse off.
==========
Pinker)
10:34:22
Through voluntary exchange, people benefit others by benefiting themselves; as he

wrote, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker
that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
==========
Pinker)
10:35:03
Exchange can make an entire society not just richer but nicer, because in an
effective market it is cheaper to buy things than to steal them, and other
==========
Pinker)
10:35:09
effective market it is cheaper to buy things than to steal them, and other
==========
Pinker)
10:35:12
effective market it is cheaper to buy things than to steal them, and other people
are more
==========
Pinker)
10:35:14
effective market it is cheaper to buy things than to steal them, and other people
are more valuable to you alive than dead.
==========
10:40:05
embezzler and still give to charitable causes? Might not a woman be an adulteress
but bring pleasure and security to two men's lives?
==========
10:40:20
man could be an embezzler and still give to charitable causes? Might not a woman be
an adulteress but bring pleasure and security to two men's lives?
==========
10:43:03
The Communists are baffled and irritated, because they have finally achieved their
perfect society, but only by the help of a God in whom they don't want to believe.
==========
10:43:31
So God sits on the edge of Her bed and weeps at night, because the only thing
everyone can agree upon is that they're all in Hell.
==========
Pinker)
08:13:33
The principle was discovered by natural selection in the form of homeostasis, as

when our bodies regulate their temperature by shivering and sweating. When it was
discovered by humans, it was engineered into analog systems like thermostats and
cruise control and then into digital systems like chess-playing programs and
autonomous robots.
==========
Pinker)
08:17:59
As Bertolt Brecht put it millennia later: Grub first, then ethics.

==========
Pinker)
08:21:29
modern evolutionary theory explains how selfish genes can give rise to unselfish
organisms.
==========
Pinker)
08:22:33
Evolution left us with another burden: our cognitive, emotional, and moral
faculties are adapted to individual survival and reproduction in an archaic
environment, not to universal thriving in a modern one.
==========
Pinker)
08:23:04
People are by nature illiterate and innumerate, quantifying the world by “one, two,
many” and by rough guesstimates.
==========
Pinker)
08:24:19
People demonize those they disagree with, attributing differences of opinion to

stupidity and dishonesty.
==========
Pinker)
08:27:42
With the right rules, a community of less than fully rational thinkers can
cultivate rational thoughts.
==========
Pinker)
08:29:06
So for all the flaws in human nature, it contains the seeds of its own improvement,
as long as it comes up with norms and institutions that channel parochial interests
into universal benefits. Among those norms are free speech, nonviolence,
cooperation, cosmopolitanism, human rights, and an acknowledgment of human
fallibility, and among the institutions are science, education, media, democratic
government, international organizations, and markets.
==========
Pinker)
10:14:57
saccharine,
==========
Pinker)
10:18:10
A human is a part of an organic whole—a culture, race, nation, religion, spirit, or

historical force—and people should creatively channel the transcendent unity of
which they are a part.
==========
Pinker)
10:18:59
“There are but three groups worthy of respect,” wrote Charles Baudelaire, “the
priest, the warrior, and the poet. To know, to kill, and to create.” It sounds mad,
but in the 21st century those counter-Enlightenment ideals continue to be found
across a surprising range of elite cultural and intellectual movements.
==========
Pinker)
10:20:00
The most obvious is religious faith. To take something on faith means to believe it
without good reason, so by definition a faith in the existence of supernatural
entities clashes with reason.
==========
Pinker)
10:20:57
Belief in an afterlife implies that health and happiness are not such a big deal,
because life on earth is an infinitesimal portion of one’s existence; that coercing
people into accepting salvation is doing them a favor; and that martyrdom may be
the best thing that can ever happen to you.
==========
Pinker)
10:25:27
It’s quite another thing when a person is forced to make the supreme sacrifice for
the benefit of a charismatic leader, a square of cloth, or colors on a map.
==========
Pinker)
10:28:23
The romantic Green movement sees the human capture of energy not as a way of
resisting entropy and enhancing human flourishing but as a heinous crime against
nature, which will exact a dreadful justice in the form of resource wars, poisoned
air and water, and civilization-ending climate change. Our only salvation is to
repent, repudiate technology and economic growth, and revert to a simpler and more
natural way of life.
==========
Pinker)
10:30:49
And even if our technological civilization manages to escape outright annihilation,

it is spiraling into a dystopia of violence and injustice: a brave new world of
terrorism, drones, sweatshops, gangs, trafficking, refugees, inequality,
cyberbullying, sexual assault, and hate crimes.
==========
Pinker)
12:26:26
situation, more of them said it would get worse.4 A large majority of Britons think
that immigration, teen pregnancy, litter, unemployment, crime, vandalism, and drugs
are a problem in the United Kingdom as a whole, while few think they are problems
in their area.
==========
Pinker)
12:26:29
4 A large majority of Britons think that immigration, teen pregnancy, litter,

unemployment, crime, vandalism, and drugs are a problem in the United Kingdom as a
whole, while few think they are problems in their area.
==========
Pinker)
12:28:07
Is pessimism correct? Could the state of the world, like the stripes on a
barbershop pole, keep sinking lower and lower?
==========
Pinker)
12:29:52
Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and as they
unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle.
==========
Pinker)
12:30:05
The peace researcher John Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once
every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and
political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase
in life expectancy.
==========
Pinker)
12:30:40
Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the

frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind.
==========
Pinker)
12:38:24
Frequent events leave stronger memory traces, so stronger memories generally

indicate more-frequent events: you really are on solid ground in guessing that
pigeons are more common in cities than orioles, even though you’re drawing on your
memory of encountering them rather than on a bird census.
==========
Pinker)
12:41:37
quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened
one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than
privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic.
==========
Pinker)
12:50:23
Progress cannot always be monotonic because solutions to problems create new

problems.18 But progress can resume when the new problems are solved in their turn.
==========
Pinker)
12:54:20
If you see that a pile of laundry has gone down, it does not mean the clothes
washed themselves; it means someone washed the clothes. If a type of violence has
gone down, then some change in the social, cultural, or material milieu has caused
it to go down. If the conditions persist, violence could remain low or decline even
further; if they don’t, it won’t. That makes it important to find out what the
causes are, so we can try to intensify them and apply them more widely to ensure
that the decline of violence continues.
==========
Pinker)
19:28:25
“The most important of all limitations on knowledge-creation is that we cannot

prophesy: we cannot predict the content of ideas yet to be created, or their
effects.
==========
Pinker)
23:47:53
How much better can you imagine yourself feeling than you are feeling right now?
How much worse can you imagine yourself feeling?
==========
Pinker)
23:53:34
A modern society is a league of political, industrial, financial, technological,

military, and intellectual elites, all competing for prestige and influence, and
with differing responsibilities for making the society run.
==========
Pinker)
10:30:44
progress is an outcome not of magic but of problem-solving.

==========
Pinker)
15:57:41
So contrary to the worry that saving children’s lives would only set off a
“population bomb” (a major eco-panic of the 1960s and 1970s, which led to calls for
reducing health care in the developing world), the decline in child mortality has
defused it.
==========
Pinker)
16:42:44
ideas—ideas that may be cheap to implement and obvious in retrospect, but which
save millions of lives. Examples include boiling, filtering, or adding bleach to
water; washing hands; giving iodine supplements to pregnant women; breast-feeding
and cuddling infants; defecating in latrines rather than in fields, streets, and
waterways; protecting sleeping children with insecticide-impregnated bed nets; and
treating diarrhea with a solution of salt and sugar in clean water.
==========
Pinker)
12:03:44
survivors quickly replenish the population.13 As Hans Rosling put it, “You can’t
stop population growth by letting poor children die.”
==========
Pinker)
12:05:15
“Whoever makes two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow where only one grew
before, deserves better of humanity, and does more essential service to his country
than the whole race of politicians put together.”
==========
Pinker)
12:08:28
Like fans at a rock concert, everyone stands up, but no one gets a better view.
==========
Pinker)
12:08:40
That’s the way evolution works: it myopically selects for individual advantage, not
the greater good of the
==========
Pinker)
12:08:43
the greater good of the species, let alone the good of some other species. From
==========
Pinker)
12:08:44
the greater good of the species, let alone the good of some other species. From
==========
Pinker)
12:08:48
the greater good of the species, let alone the good of some other species.
==========
Pinker)
12:16:06
Of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent
were victims of Communist regimes’ forced collectivization, punitive confiscation,
and totalitarian central planning.36 These included famines in the Soviet Union in
the aftermaths of the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and World War II;
Stalin’s Holodomor (terror-famine) in Ukraine in 1932–33; Mao’s Great Leap Forward
in 1958–61; Pol Pot’s Year Zero in 1975–79; and Kim Jong-il’s Arduous March
==========
Pinker)
12:16:09
Of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent
were victims of Communist regimes’ forced collectivization, punitive confiscation,
and totalitarian central planning.36 These included famines in the Soviet Union in
the aftermaths of the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and World War II;
Stalin’s Holodomor (terror-famine) in Ukraine in 1932–33; Mao’s Great Leap Forward
in 1958–61; Pol Pot’s Year Zero in 1975–79; and Kim Jong-il’s Arduous March in
North Korea as recently as the late 1990s.
==========
Pinker)
10:22:34
The need to explain the creation of wealth is obscured yet again by political
debates within modern societies on how wealth ought to be distributed, which
presuppose that wealth worth distributing exists in the first place.
==========
Pinker)
10:23:00
Economists speak of a “lump fallacy” or “physical fallacy” in which a finite amount

of wealth has existed since the beginning of time, like a lode of gold, and people
have been fighting over how to divide it up ever since.4
==========
Pinker)
- Your Highlight on page 103 | location 1567 | Added on Monday, 16 April 2018
10:25:32
==========
Pinker)
10:27:57
A refrigerator today costs around $500. How much would someone have to pay you to
give up refrigeration? Surely far more than $500! Adam Smith called it the paradox
of value: when an important good becomes plentiful, it costs far less than what
people are willing to pay for it. The difference is called consumer surplus, and
the explosion of
==========
Pinker)
10:28:00
A refrigerator today costs around $500. How much would someone have to pay you to
give up refrigeration? Surely far more than $500! Adam Smith called it the paradox
of value: when an important good becomes plentiful, it costs far less than what
people are willing to pay for it. The difference is called consumer surplus, and
the explosion of this surplus over time is impossible to tabulate.
==========
Pinker)
10:38:40
Not only did new products and techniques emerge; it became better understood why
and how the old ones worked, and thus they could be refined, debugged, improved,
combined with others in novel ways and adapted to new uses.”
==========
Pinker)
10:39:51
One was the development of institutions that lubricated the exchange of goods,
services, and ideas—the dynamic singled out by Adam Smith as the generator of
wealth.
==========
Pinker)
10:42:46
Today I take it for granted that if I want some milk, I can walk into a convenience
store and a quart will be on the shelves, the milk won’t be diluted or tainted, it
will be for sale at a price I can afford, and the owner will let me walk out with
it after a swipe of a card, even though we have never met, may never see each other
again, and have no friends in common who can testify to our bona fides.
==========
Pinker)
10:46:58
In a theory that could only have been thought up by an assimilated German Jew, the
sociologist Max Weber proposed in 1905 that capitalism depended on a “Protestant
ethic.” But the Catholic countries of Europe soon zoomed out of poverty too, and a
succession of other escapes shown in figure 8-2 have put the lie to various
theories explaining why Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, or generic “Asian” or
“Latin” values were incompatible with dynamic market economies.
==========
Pinker)
10:47:18
The Great Escape is becoming the Great Convergence.

==========
Pinker)
15:03:26
Since 1995, 30 of the world’s 109 developing countries, including countries as

diverse as Bangladesh, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Georgia, Mongolia, Mozambique,
Panama, Rwanda, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam, have enjoyed economic growth rates that
amount to a doubling of income every eighteen years. Another 40 countries have had
rates that would double income every thirty-five years, which is comparable to the
historical growth rate of the United States.
==========
Pinker)
- Your Highlight on page 109 | location 1661 | Added on Monday, 16 April 2018
15:04:55
==========
Pinker)
15:12:44
Every additional long-lived, healthy, well-fed, well-off person is a sentient being

capable of happiness, and the world is a better place for having more of them.
Also, an increase in the number of people who can withstand the grind of entropy
and the struggle of evolution is a testimonial to the sheer magnitude of the
benevolent powers of science, markets, good government, and other modern
institutions.
==========
Pinker)
15:18:56
Also, as we approach the goal we should move the goalposts, since not-so-extreme
poverty is still poverty.
==========
Pinker)
15:19:36
And since we know that something has worked, it’s unnecessary to keep depicting the
developing world as a basket case to shake people out of their apathy—with the
danger that they will think that additional support would just be throwing money
down a rat hole.
==========
Pinker)
15:20:58
“In 1976,” Radelet writes, “Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the
direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died.”
==========
Pinker)
- Your Bookmark on page 113 | location 1728 | Added on Monday, 16 April 2018
15:22:41
==========
Pinker)
15:28:11
Civil war is both a humanitarian disaster and an economic one, as facilities are
destroyed, resources are diverted, children are kept out of school, and managers
and workers are pulled away from work or killed. The economist Paul Collier, who
calls war “development in reverse,” has estimated that a typical civil war costs a
country $50 billion.
==========
Pinker)
15:31:45
accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of your
aesthetic revulsion.
==========
Pinker)
15:32:37
It is all very well for us, sitting pretty, to think that material standards of
living don’t matter all that much. It is all very well for one, as a personal
choice, to reject industrialisation—do a modern Walden if you like, and if you go
without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts
of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the
strength of your aesthetic revulsion. But I don’t respect you in the slightest if,
even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to
choose. In fact, we know what their choice would be. For, with singular unanimity,
in any country where they have had the chance, the poor have walked off the land
into the factories as fast as the factories could take them.42
==========
Pinker)
15:34:11
“while working on the factory floor is often referred to as sweatshop labor, it is

often better than the granddaddy of all sweatshops: working in the fields as an
agricultural day laborer.”
==========
Pinker)
15:43:41
Progress consists of unbundling the features of a social process as much as we can

to maximize the human benefits while minimizing the harms.
==========
Pinker)
15:46:24
Today about half the adults in the world own a smartphone, and there are as many
subscriptions as people. In parts of the world without roads, landlines, postal
service, newspapers, or banks, mobile phones are more than a way to share gossip
and cat photos; they are a major generator of wealth. They allow people to transfer
money, order supplies, track the weather and markets, find day labor, get advice on
health and farming practices, even obtain a primary education.50 An analysis by the
economist Robert Jensen subtitled “The Micro and Mackerel Economics of Information”
showed how South Indian small fishermen increased their income and lowered the
local price of fish by using their mobile phones at sea to find the market which
offered the best price that day, sparing them from having to unload their
perishable catch on fish-glutted towns while other towns went fishless.51 In this
way mobile phones are allowing hundreds of millions of small farmers and fishers to
become the omniscient rational actors in the ideal frictionless markets of
economics textbooks. According to one estimate, every cell phone adds $3,000 to the
annual GDP of a developing country.52 The beneficent power of knowledge has
==========
Pinker)
15:46:29
Today about half the adults in the world own a smartphone, and there are as many
subscriptions as people. In parts of the world without roads, landlines, postal
service, newspapers, or banks, mobile phones are more than a way to share gossip
and cat photos; they are a major generator of wealth. They allow people to transfer
money, order supplies, track the weather and markets, find day labor, get advice on
health and farming practices, even obtain a primary education.50 An analysis by the
economist Robert Jensen subtitled “The Micro and Mackerel Economics of Information”
showed how South Indian small fishermen increased their income and lowered the
local price of fish by using their mobile phones at sea to find the market which
offered the best price that day, sparing them from having to unload their
perishable catch on fish-glutted towns while other towns went fishless.51 In this
way mobile phones are allowing hundreds of millions of small farmers and fishers to
become the omniscient rational actors in the ideal frictionless markets of
economics textbooks. According to one estimate, every cell phone adds $3,000 to the
annual GDP of a developing country.52
==========
Pinker)
16:42:29
“From the point of view of morality, it is not important everyone should have the
same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.”6 Indeed, a narrow
focus on economic inequality
==========
Pinker)
16:42:35
“From the point of view of morality, it is not important everyone should have the
same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.”6
==========
Pinker)
16:47:48
When the rich get too rich, everyone else feels poor, so inequality lowers well-
being even if everyone gets richer. This is an old idea in social psychology,
variously called the theory of social comparison, reference groups, status anxiety,
or relative deprivation.
==========
Pinker)
16:53:29
The economic inequality causes the ills, they argue: unequal societies make people
feel that they are pitted in a winner-take-all competition for dominance, and the
stress makes them sick and self-destructive.
==========
Pinker)
16:59:21
In developing countries, inequality is not dispiriting but heartening: people in

the more unequal societies are happier. The authors suggest that whatever envy,
status anxiety, or relative deprivation people may feel in poor, unequal countries
is swamped by hope.
==========
Pinker)
17:00:10
inequality hurt the aging generation that grew up under communism, but helped or
made no difference to the younger generations.)
==========
Pinker)
17:25:17
been pushed into marginal lands and lead nomadic lives that make the accumulation
of wealth impossible, if for no other reason than that it would be a nuisance to
carry around.
==========
Pinker)
23:31:28
The historian Walter Scheidel identifies “Four Horsemen of Leveling”: mass-

mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and lethal
pandemics.
==========
Pinker)
- Your Highlight on page 135 | location 2068-2069 | Added on Saturday, 21 April
2018 19:00:01
the Egalitarian Revolution, modern societies now devote a substantial chunk of

their wealth to health, education, pensions, and income support.
==========
Pinker)
2018 19:00:18
The explosion in social spending has redefined the mission of government: from
warring and policing to also nurturing.
==========
Pinker)
2018 19:00:35
Social spending inoculates citizens against the appeal of communism and fascism.
==========
Pinker)
2018 19:01:27
side of Route 66. Since there’s no point in everyone sending money to the
government and getting it right back (minus the bureaucracy’s cut), social spending
is designed to help people who have less money, with the bill footed by people who
have more money.
==========
Pinker)
2018 19:03:19
In Canada the top two national pastimes (after hockey) are complaining about their
health care system and boasting about their health care system.
==========
Pinker)
2018 19:04:59
Social spending, like everything, has downsides. As with all insurance, it can
create a “moral hazard” in which the insured slack off or take foolish risks,
counting on the insurer to bail them out if they fail. And since the premiums have
to cover the payouts, if the actuaries get the numbers wrong or the numbers change
so that more money is taken out than put in, the system can collapse.
==========
Pinker)
2018 19:06:14
In reality social spending is never exactly like insurance but is a combination of

insurance, investment, and charity. Its success thus depends on the degree to which
the citizens of a country sense they are part of one community, and that fellow
feeling can be strained when the beneficiaries are disproportionately immigrants or
ethnic minorities.
==========
Pinker)
2018 19:20:44
Income is just a means to an end: a way of paying for things that people need,
want, and like, or as economists gracelessly call it, consumption.
==========
Pinker)
2018 19:24:19
Education, a major driver of economic mobility, is not keeping up with the demands
of modern economies: tertiary education has soared in cost (defying the
inexpensification of almost every other good), and in poor American neighborhoods,
primary and secondary education are unconscionably substandard.
==========
Pinker)
2018 19:25:19
Rather than tilting at inequality per se it may be more constructive to target the
specific problems lumped with
==========
Pinker)
2018 19:25:28
Rather than tilting at inequality per se it may be more constructive to target the
specific problems lumped with it.65
==========
Pinker)
17:34:54
I won’t pretend that all the trends are positive or that the problems facing us are
minor. But I will present a way of thinking about these problems that differs from
the lugubrious conventional wisdom and offers a constructive alternative to the
radicalism or fatalism it encourages.
==========
Pinker)
19:15:17
has been called Ecomodernism, Ecopragmatism, Earth Optimism, and the Blue-Green or
Turquoise movement, though we can also think of it as Enlightenment
Environmentalism or Humanistic Environmentalism.
==========
Pinker)
19:15:28
Recently an alternative approach to environmental protection has been championed by

John Asafu-Adjaye, Jesse Ausubel, Andrew Balmford, Stewart Brand, Ruth DeFries,
Nancy Knowlton, Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, and others. It has been called
Ecomodernism, Ecopragmatism, Earth Optimism, and the Blue-Green or Turquoise
movement, though we can also think of it as Enlightenment Environmentalism or
Humanistic Environmentalism.
==========
Pinker)
19:17:21
Every food plant is a pathetic narrow specialist in one skill, inbred for thousands
of years to a state of genetic idiocy!
==========
Pinker)
19:17:32
Every food plant is a pathetic narrow specialist in one skill, inbred for thousands
of years to a state of genetic idiocy! Those plants are so fragile, they had to
domesticate humans just to take endless care of them!
==========
Pinker)
19:20:12
As societies get richer and people no longer think about putting food on the table
or a roof over their heads, their values climb a hierarchy of needs, and the scope
of their concern expands in space and time.
==========
Pinker)
19:21:11
First, death rates decline as nutrition and health improve. This does swell the
population, but that is hardly something to bewail: as Johan Norberg notes, it
happens not because people in poor countries start breeding like rabbits but
because they stop dying like flies.
==========
Pinker)
19:24:40
Indeed, it’s a fallacy to think that people “need resources” in the first place.17
They need ways of growing food, moving around, lighting their homes, displaying
information, and other sources of well-being.
==========
Pinker)
19:27:05
night soil (a euphemism for human feces),

==========
Pinker)
19:27:45
farmers could save massive amounts if they switched to Israeli-style precision

farming.
==========
Pinker)
19:29:02
Green claim that only degrowth can curb pollution and the orthodox right-wing claim
that environmental protection must sabotage economic growth and people’s standard
of living.
==========
Pinker)
19:30:04
Deforestation of the world’s largest tropical forest, the Amazon, peaked in 1995,
and from 2004 to 2013 the rate fell by four-fifths.
==========
Pinker)
19:30:12
The time-lagged decline of deforestation in the tropics is one sign that

environmental protection is spreading from developed countries to the rest of the
world.
==========
Pinker)
19:30:41
Two of the deadliest forms of pollution—contaminated drinking water and indoor

cooking smoke—are afflictions of poor countries.27
==========
Pinker)
01:19:14
As Brand notes, “No end of specific wildlife problems remain to be solved, but
describing them too often as extinction crises has led to a general panic that
nature is extremely fragile or already hopelessly broken.
==========
Pinker)
23:28:15
We’re not going to win this as bean counters. We can’t beat the bean counters at
their own game. We’re going to win this because this is an issue of values, human
rights, right and wrong. We just have this brief period where we also have to have
some nice stats that we can wield, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that
what actually moves people’s hearts are the arguments based on the value of
==========
Pinker)
23:28:22
We’re not going to win this as bean counters. We can’t beat the bean counters at
their own game. We’re going to win this because this is an issue of values, human
rights, right and wrong. We just have this brief period where we also have to have
some nice stats that we can wield, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that
what actually moves people’s hearts are the arguments based on the value of life.53
==========
Pinker)
08:14:51
people are likelier to accept the fact of global warming when they are told that
the problem is solvable by innovations in policy and technology than when they are
given dire warnings about how awful it will be.
==========
Pinker)
08:17:50
Howard—people esteem others according to how much time or money they forfeit in
their altruistic acts rather than by how much good they accomplish.
==========
Pinker)
08:19:56
Needless to say, the people who actually live in those countries have a different
idea. Escaping from poverty requires abundant energy.
==========
Pinker)
- Your Highlight on page 180 | location 2756 | Added on Tuesday, 24 April 2018
08:23:44
==========
Pinker)
08:25:11
decarbonization needs to be helped along with pushes from policy and technology, an
idea called deep decarbonization.
==========
Pinker)
08:26:57
(As Al Gore put it: Tax what you burn, not what you earn.)
==========
Pinker)
08:29:46
Why are Western countries going the wrong way? Nuclear power presses a number of
psychological buttons—fear of poisoning, ease of imagining catastrophes, distrust
of the unfamiliar and the man-made—and the dread has been amplified by the
traditional Green movement and its dubiously “progressive” supporters.
==========
Pinker)
2018 07:56:44
Other ideas for manipulating the atmosphere and oceans have been bruited about as
well, though research on all of them is in its infancy.
==========
Pinker)
2018 08:01:23
Paul Romer distinguishes between complacent optimism, the feeling of a child

waiting for presents on Christmas morning, and conditional optimism, the feeling of
a child who wants a treehouse and realizes that if he gets some wood and nails and
persuades other kids to help him, he can build one.
==========
Pinker)
2018 08:02:00
prevent the harms and we have the means

==========
Pinker)
2018 08:02:22
That does not mean that they will solve themselves, but it does mean that we can
solve them if we sustain the benevolent forces of modernity that have allowed us to
solve problems so far, including societal prosperity, wisely regulated markets,
international governance, and investments in science and technology.
==========
Pinker)
2018 09:14:58
The world’s wars are now concentrated almost exclusively in a zone stretching from
Nigeria to Pakistan, an area containing less than a sixth of the world’s
population.
==========
Pinker)
2018 09:16:57
Searing images of desperate refugees from the Syrian civil war, many of them
struggling to resettle in Europe, have led to the claim that the world now has more
refugees than at any time in history. But this is another symptom of historical
amnesia and the Availability bias.
==========
Pinker)
2018 09:17:23
The political scientist Joshua Goldstein notes that today’s four million Syrian
refugees are outnumbered by the ten million displaced by the Bangladesh War of
Independence in 1971, the fourteen million displaced by the partition of India in
1947, and the sixty million displaced by World War II in Europe alone, eras when
the world’s population was a fraction of what it is now.
==========
Pinker)
2018 09:17:42
It honors the suffering of yesterday’s victims, and it ensures that policymakers
will act in their interests by working from an accurate understanding of the world.
==========
Pinker)
2018 01:08:36
It also saw practical suggestions for how to reduce or even eliminate war,
particularly Kant’s famous essay “Perpetual Peace.”
==========
Pinker)
2018 01:10:08
Another brainchild of the Enlightenment is the theory that democratic government

serves as a brake on glory-drunk leaders who would drag their countries into
pointless wars. Starting in the 1970s, and accelerating after the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989, more countries gave democracy a chance (chapter 14).
==========
Pinker)
2018 01:10:33
realpolitik.
==========
Pinker)
2018 01:11:24
The reason that Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah are
American states is that in 1846 the United States conquered them from Mexico in a
war over unpaid debts.
==========
Pinker)
2018 01:11:56
the world’s nations have committed themselves to not waging war except in self-
defense or with the approval of the United Nations Security Council.
==========
Pinker)
2018 01:13:04
More often the prohibition has functioned as a norm—“War is something that

civilized nations just don’t do”—backed by economic sanctions and symbolic
punishments. Those penalties are effective to the extent that nations value their
standing in the international community—a reminder of why we should cherish and
strengthen that community in the face of threats from populist nationalism today.24
==========
Pinker)
2018 01:14:18
As European empires vacated the colonial territories they had conquered, they often
left behind weak states with fuzzy borders and no single recognized successor to
govern them. The states often fell into civil war and intercommunal violence. Under
the new international order, they were no longer legitimate targets of conquest by
more effective powers, and hung on in semi-anarchy for years or decades.
==========
Pinker)
2018 01:15:26
That helps explain the shrinking geography of war, with most regions of the globe
at peace.
==========
Pinker)
2018 01:19:17
Human life has become more precious, while glory, honor, preeminence, manliness,
heroism, and other symptoms of excess testosterone have been downgraded.
==========
01:24:23
fill a mug with steaming coffee and sit in the doorway facing the sunrise, hungry
for the warmth.
==========
01:29:58
Everything is lovely and wild, with a virginal sweetness.

==========
01:31:40
Pretty bad, neither potable nor palatable.

==========
01:33:41
But for the time being, around my place at least, the air is untroubled, and I
become aware for the first time today of the immense silence in which I am
==========
01:33:50
But for the time being, around my place at least, the air is untroubled, and I
become aware for the first time today of the immense silence in which I am lost.
==========
04:39:12
For an instant I am paralyzed by wonder; then, stung by a fear too ancient and
powerful to overcome I scramble back, rising to my knees.
==========
01:14:30
but a bee in a cactus bloom will not be provoked; it stays until the flower wilts.
Until closing time.
==========
11:38:53
continue my walk with a new, augmented cheerfulness which is hard to understand but
unmistakable.
==========
11:39:00
I continue my walk with a new, augmented cheerfulness which is hard to understand

but unmistakable.
==========
Pinker)
16:41:23
The inventor of the highway guard rail did not get a Nobel Prize, nor are
humanitarian awards given to designers of clearer prescription drug labels.
==========
Pinker)
16:42:07
precisely because it is no accident, homicide. With the exception of the world

wars, more people are killed in homicides than wars.4 During the battle-scarred
year of 2015 the ratio was around 4.5 to 1; more commonly it is 10 to 1 or higher.
==========
Pinker)
16:44:34
With the exception of the world wars, more people are killed in homicides than
wars.4 During the battle-scarred year of 2015 the ratio was around 4.5 to 1; more
commonly it is 10 to 1 or higher.
==========
Pinker)
16:44:45
serfs
==========
Pinker)
16:46:32
Gentle commerce proliferated, and the zero-sum plundering of land gave way to a
positive-sum trade of goods and services. People became enmeshed in networks of
commercial and occupational obligations laid out in legal and bureaucratic rules.
Their norms for everyday conduct shifted from a macho culture of honor, in which
affronts had to be answered with violence, to a gentlemanly culture of dignity, in
which status was won by displays of propriety and self-control.
==========
Pinker)
16:52:59
Half of the world’s homicides are committed in just twenty-three countries

containing about a tenth of humanity, and a quarter are committed in just four:
Brazil (25.2), Colombia (25.9), Mexico (12.9), and Venezuela.
==========
Pinker)
16:55:11
a 50 percent reduction in thirty years is not just practicable but almost

conservative.
==========
Pinker)
16:57:02
This “Hobbesian trap,”

==========
Pinker)
16:57:36
on the legitimate use of force—that is, a state with a police force and judiciary—
can nip this cycle in the bud. Not only does it disincentivize aggressors by the
threat of punishment, but it reassures everyone else that the aggressors are
disincentivized and thereby relieves them of the need for belligerent self-defense.
==========
Pinker)
16:57:58
But crime rates can also soar when law enforcement is merely ineffective—when it is
so inept, corrupt, or overwhelmed that people know they can break the law with
impunity.
==========
Pinker)
16:58:42
“An effective rule of law, based on legitimate law enforcement, victim protection,
swift and fair adjudication, moderate punishment, and humane prisons is critical to
sustainable reductions in lethal violence.”
==========
Pinker)
17:03:00
The reasons were explained by Cesare Beccaria two hundred and fifty years ago.
While the threat of ever-harsher punishments is both cheap and emotionally
satisfying, it’s not particularly effective, because scofflaws just treat them like
rare accidents—horrible, yes, but a risk that comes with the job. Punishments that
are predictable, even if less draconian, are likelier to be factored into day-to-
day choices.
==========
Pinker)
17:03:29
Together with the presence of law enforcement, the legitimacy of the regime appears
to matter, because people not only respect legitimate authority themselves but
factor in the degree to which they expect their potential adversaries to respect
it.
==========
Pinker)
17:03:44
crime often shoots up in decades in which people question their society and
government, including the American Civil War, the 1960s, and post-Soviet Russia.
==========
Pinker)
17:04:38
They concluded that the single most effective tactic for reducing violent crime is
focused deterrence. A “laser-like focus” must first be directed on the
neighborhoods where crime is rampant or even just starting to creep up, with the
“hot spots” identified by data gathered in real time.
==========
Pinker)
17:05:02
And it must deliver a simple and concrete message about the behavior that is
expected of them, like “Stop shooting and we will help you, keep shooting and we
will put you in prison.” Getting the message through, and then enforcing it,
depends on the cooperation of other members of the community—the store owners,
preachers, coaches, probation officers, and relatives.
==========
Pinker)
17:05:51
Also provably effective is cognitive behavioral therapy. This has nothing to do

with psychoanalyzing an offender’s childhood conflicts or propping his eyelids open
while he retches to violent film clips like in A Clockwork Orange. It is a set of
protocols designed to override the habits of thought and behavior that lead to
criminal acts. Troublemakers are impulsive: they seize on sudden opportunities to
steal or vandalize, and lash out at people who cross them, heedless of the long-
term consequences.35 These temptations can be counteracted with therapies that
teach strategies of self-control. Troublemakers also have narcissistic and
sociopathic thought patterns, such as that they are always in the right, that they
are entitled to universal deference, that disagreements are personal insults, and
that other people have no feelings or interests. Though they cannot be “cured” of
these delusions, they can be trained to recognize and counteract them.36 This
swaggering mindset is amplified in a culture of honor, and it can be deconstructed
in therapies of anger management and social-skills training as part of counseling
for at-risk youth or programs to prevent recidivism.
==========
Pinker)
17:06:28
When cars are harder to steal, houses are harder to burgle, goods are harder to
pilfer and fence, pedestrians carry more credit cards than cash, and dark alleys
are lit and video-monitored, would-be criminals don’t seek another outlet for their
larcenous urges. The temptation passes, and a crime is not committed.
==========
Pinker)
17:14:53
Cheap consumer goods are another development that has turned weak-willed
delinquents into law-abiding citizens despite themselves.
==========
Pinker)
17:23:52
Entrepreneurs in illegal goods and pastimes cannot file a lawsuit when they feel
they have been swindled, or call the police when someone threatens them, so they
have to protect their interests with a credible threat of violence.
==========
Pinker)
17:24:22
In the meantime, Abt and Winship observe that “aggressive drug enforcement yields
little anti-drug benefits and generally increases violence,” while “drug courts and
treatment have a long history of effectiveness.”
==========
Pinker)
17:30:17
Wealth buys life.
==========
Pinker)
17:38:31
The campaign led to the now-ubiquitous sprinklers, smoke detectors, fire doors,
fire escapes, fire drills, fire extinguishers, fire-retardant materials, and fire
safety education mascots like Smokey the Bear and Sparky the Fire Dog.
==========
Pinker)
17:43:13
With the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy, many social critics have
expressed nostalgia for the era of factories, mines, and mills, probably because
they never worked in one.
==========
17:53:05
It's a small fraction of the world population— about 0.00002 percent—but it seems
like plenty to you.
==========
17:53:48
forlorn.
==========
18:06:53
In one sense, the Italians were proved right: communism did not eliminate the
distinction between rulers and ruled, or end oppression by elites; it merely
changed the identity of those in charge.
==========
18:17:55
From their perspective, democratic electorates do not always choose well: they may
choose short-term demands over long-term sustainability; they often vote on the
basis of personality rather than policies; they sometimes vote for clientelistic
reasons; they may want to redistribute income in ways that will kill incentives and
growth.
==========
18:18:31
As in the nineteenth century, elites are often good at dressing up their own narrow
self-interest as universal truths.
==========
18:30:18
Democracy emerges when the threat is severe enough that the rich make concessions
with regard to political rights and outright redistribution.16 The middle classes
can make alliances in either direction,
==========
18:30:28
The middle classes can make alliances in either direction, but more often than not
they are bought off by the rich to support at most very limited democracy.
==========
Pinker)
- Your Highlight on page 243 | location 3719-3720 | Added on Wednesday, 2 May 2018
15:31:18
In the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001, violence that used to be
called “insurgency” or “guerrilla warfare” is now often classified as “terrorism.”
==========
Pinker)
15:36:37
Modern terrorism is a by-product of the vast reach of the media.11 A group or an

individual seeks a slice of the world’s attention by the one guaranteed means of
attracting it: killing innocent people, especially in circumstances in which
readers of the news can imagine themselves. News media gobble the bait and give the
atrocities saturation coverage. The Availability heuristic kicks in and people
become stricken with a fear that is unrelated to the level of danger.
==========
Pinker)
15:41:03
intact navy. From their position of weakness, Harari notes, what terrorists seek to
accomplish is not damage but theater. The image that most people retain from 9/11
is not Al Qaeda’s attack on the Pentagon—which actually destroyed part of the
enemy’s military headquarters and killed commanders and analysts—but its attack on
the totemic World Trade Center, which killed brokers, accountants, and other
civilians.
==========
Pinker)
15:43:40
Erik Madfis, has recommended a policy for rampage shootings of “Don’t Name Them,
Don’t Show Them, but Report Everything Else,”
==========
Pinker)
15:44:07
And people could be encouraged to keep calm and carry on, as the British wartime
poster famously urged during a time of much greater peril. Over the
==========
Pinker)
15:44:12
And people could be encouraged to keep calm and carry on, as the British wartime
poster famously urged during a time of much greater peril.
==========
Pinker)
- Your Highlight on page 252 | location 3861-3863 | Added on Thursday, 3 May 2018
00:23:29
Francis Fukuyama published a famous essay in which he proposed that liberal

democracy represented “the end of history,” not because nothing would ever happen
again but because the world was coming to a consensus over the humanly best form of
governance and no longer had to fight over it.
==========
Pinker)
00:24:31
Democratization, they said, was a conceit of Westerners projecting their tastes

onto the rest of the world, whereas authoritarianism seemed to suit most of
humanity just fine.
==========
Pinker)
00:25:25
good rule of thumb is that any country that has the word “democratic” in its
official name, like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (a.k.a. North Korea)
or the German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. East Germany), isn’t one.
==========
Pinker)
08:10:00
Most voters are ignorant not just of current policy options but of basic facts,
such as what the major branches of government are, who the United States fought in
World War II, and which countries have used nuclear weapons. Their opinions flip
depending on how a question is worded: they say that the government spends too much
on “welfare” but too little on “assistance to the poor,” and that it should “use
military force” but not “go to war.”
==========
Pinker)
08:11:28
Many political scientists have concluded that most people correctly recognize that
their votes are astronomically unlikely to affect the outcome of an election, and
so they prioritize work, family, and leisure over educating themselves about
politics and calibrating their votes. They use the franchise as a form of self-
expression: they vote for candidates who they think are like them and stand for
their kind of people. So despite the widespread
==========
Pinker)
08:11:32
Many political scientists have concluded that most people correctly recognize that
their votes are astronomically unlikely to affect the outcome of an election, and
so they prioritize work, family, and leisure over educating themselves about
politics and calibrating their votes. They use the franchise as a form of self-
expression: they vote for candidates who they think are like them and stand for
their kind of people.
==========
Pinker)
08:16:30
The freedom to complain rests on an assurance that the government won’t punish or
silence the complainer.
==========
Pinker)
08:18:51
The political scientist Kathryn Sikkink calls this the information paradox: as
human rights watchdogs admirably look harder for abuse, look in more places for
abuse, and classify more acts as abuse, they find more of it—but if we don’t
compensate for their keener powers of detection, we can be misled into thinking
that there is more abuse to detect.31
==========
Pinker)
08:27:05
(“Those without the capital get the punishment”),

==========
10:25:14
On Saturday evenings in Xizhou, there is an “English corner” for informal

conversation, in one of the village play yards. It was started by some American
friends of ours, who opened a small cultural center and inn in the village. About a
dozen kids showed up the evening we were there, to play games and practice their
English with any English speakers who might show up. A few curious parents hovered
around the edges of the group, and a few more sat in the circle among the children
to absorb what they could.
==========
10:26:09
is Ming. She is twelve years old.” Or “This is Liang. He is eleven years old.” The
kids caught on right away, but when one would confuse “he” and “she,” the rest,
like vultures, would home in screaming mercilessly “HE! HE!!” or “SHE! SHE!!”
==========
10:27:23
two different characters: tā he is and she is

==========
10:27:32
by two
==========
10:27:48
two different characters: tā he is and she is .

==========
10:29:15
A good rule of thumb for Chinese would be: unless you really need to use the
pronoun to clarify the context, or highlight the antecedent of the pronouns, or
otherwise draw attention in some way, just leave it out. From the Chinese point of
view, I suppose they might say that the rest of the world litters its speech with
unnecessary pronouns.
==========
10:31:59
The teachers just don’t drill pronouns, one Chinese friend told me, and getting no
practice means you are always performing “an alien mental calculation”
==========
10:32:03
The teachers just don’t drill pronouns, one Chinese friend told me, and getting no
practice means you are always performing “an alien mental calculation” to come up
with a choice of he or she.
==========
10:32:46
One of my most reliable language resources, Miranda, a young Chinese woman, said
she thought that the source of vagueness occurred well before going to school. It’s
all about cognition and development, she ventured. English speakers have to run
into the concept of pronoun gender in language from the get-go, because they have
to distinguish he and she. But for the Chinese, it isn’t an important concept.
Cognitively, everything is tā. Only later, once children begin to read and write
the characters and , are they even introduced to the concept of gender in language.
==========
10:36:26
We Chinese are not encouraged to use the word “self” so often. The old comrades in
the work unit would say, how can you think of “self” most of the time but not about
others and the whole society?
==========
12:42:16
Chinese has just a meager collection of borrowed words. And because of the limited
syllable structure in Chinese, it is difficult to “sinify” the words from other
languages. So, the small lexicon of Chinese borrowed words bears little resemblance
to their origins: mótè (model, as in fashion model), qiǎokèlì (chocolate), shālā
(salad), luómàn (romance) and luóji (logic).
==========
12:44:02
Kāiguān is kāi (open) + guān (close) = a switch, as in to switch a light on and

off. “Will you open-close the light?” Hǎohuài is hǎo (good) + huài (bad) = quality.
“The good-bad of this cloth makes it look cheap.” Duōshǎo is duō (many, much) +
shǎo (few, little) = how many or how much. “Do you have much-little time to spend
with me?” Hūxī is hū (exhale) + xī (inhale) = breathe.
==========
12:44:24
Zuǒyòu is zuǒ (left) + yòu (right) = approximately, nearly or about. “There is

enough coffee to make left-right one more pot.” Dōngxi is dōng (east) + xi (west) =
stuff or things. “I’m going out to get a few east-west for the house.” Gāoǎi is gāo
(tall) + ǎi (short) = height. “I started to notice the number of newspaper ads for
jobs that came with prerequisites for a candidate’s minimum tall-short.” Dàxiǎo is
dà (big) + xiǎo (small) = size. “Which big-small do you want to try on?”
==========
12:45:59
Diànhuà = electric + huà (speech) = telephone or telephone call Diànnǎo = electric

+ nǎo (brain) = computer Diànshì = electric + shì (view) = TV Diàntī = electric +
tī (stairs) = elevator Diànyǐng = electric + yǐng (shadow) = movie or film Diànbào
= electric + bào (report) = telegram or cable Diànchē = electric + chē (vehicle) =
tram or streetcar
==========
12:46:37
Fùmǔ = fù (father) + mǔ (mother) = parent Yǔmào = yǔ (rain) + mào (hat) = rainhat

Míngbai = míng (clear) + bai (white) = understand
==========
12:46:50
Yānhóng = yān (eye) + hóng (red) = jealous Niánqīng = nián (year, age) + qīng
(light) = young Tiānqì = tiān (heaven) + qì (breath) = weather Huǒchē = huǒ (fire)
+ chē (car, wagon) = train
==========
12:48:17
An artist was drawing an animal picture on the wall of his cave. His neighbors came
along, saw the work, were impressed, and began arguing over whether the animal was
a horse or a tiger. The arguments escalated until the village folk stepped back,
got a grip and realized that if they could not agree on what the drawing
represented, then perhaps it wasn’t actually so good after all. Hence,
horsehorsetigertiger, or mǎmahūhū, became the shortcut way to describe the quality
of something as so-so.
==========
Pinker)
- Your Highlight on page 269 | location 4121-4123 | Added on Friday, 4 May 2018
16:46:27
Some commentators worried that his victory represented a turning point in the
nation’s progress toward equality and rights, or that it uncovered the ugly truth
that we had never made progress in the first place.
==========
Pinker)
16:49:32
He suggests that these searches can serve as an unobtrusive indicator of private

racism.
==========
Pinker)
16:55:01
Compared with the country as a whole, retirement communities are seven times as
likely to search for “nigger jokes” and thirty times as likely to search for “fag
jokes.”
==========
Pinker)
17:01:31
Violence against women is best measured by victimization surveys, because they

circumvent the problem of underreporting to the police;
==========
Pinker)
17:02:49
In a cosmopolitan society, people rub shoulders, do business, and find themselves

in the same boat with other kinds of people, and that tends to make them more
sympathetic to one another.25 Also, as people are forced to justify the way they
treat other people, rather than dominating them out of instinctive, religious, or
historical inertia, any justification for prejudicial treatment will crumble under
scrutiny.
==========
Pinker)
- Your Highlight on page 279 | location 4275-4277 | Added on Saturday, 5 May 2018
19:41:11
In his book Freedom Rising, the political scientist Christian Welzel (building on a
collaboration with Ron Inglehart, Pippa Norris, and others) has proposed that the
process of modernization has stimulated the rise of “emancipative values.”
==========
Pinker)
19:42:21
In his book Freedom Rising, the political scientist Christian Welzel (building on a
collaboration with Ron Inglehart, Pippa Norris, and others) has proposed that the
process of modernization has stimulated the rise of “emancipative values.”36 As
societies shift from agrarian to industrial to informational, their citizens become
less anxious about fending off enemies and other existential threats and more eager
to express their ideals and to pursue opportunities in life.
==========
Pinker)
19:43:14
Emancipative values may also be called liberal values, in the classical sense
related to “liberty” and “liberation” (rather than the sense of political leftism).
==========
23:06:04
For there is a cloud on my horizon. A small dark cloud no bigger than my hand. Its
name is Progress.
==========
23:10:28
Look, the party chief explained, you need this road. He was a pleasant-mannered,
soft-spoken civil engineer with an unquestioning dedication to his work. A very
dangerous man.
==========
23:13:09
Progress has come at last to the Arches, after a million years of neglect.
Industrial Tourism has arrived.
==========
23:28:25
Wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under
the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a
completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment.
==========
Pinker)
15:07:38
Any tour of progress in rights must look at the most vulnerable sector of humanity,
children, who cannot agitate for their own interests but depend upon the compassion
of others. We’ve already seen that children the world over have become better off:
they are less likely to enter the world motherless, die before their fifth
birthday, or grow up stunted for lack of food.
==========
Pinker)
15:10:10
No one thought of child labor as exploitation; it was a form of moral education,

protecting children from idleness and sloth.
==========
Pinker)
15:10:30
Starting with influential treatises by John Locke in 1693 and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
in 1762, childhood was reconceptualized.50 A carefree youth was now considered a
human birthright. Play was an essential form of learning, and the early years of
life shaped the adult and determined the future of society.
==========
Pinker)
15:14:16
They accumulate and share that knowledge with the use of language, gesture, and
face-to-face tutelage.
==========
Pinker)
15:17:13
The first countries that made the Great Escape from universal poverty in the 19th
century, and the countries that have grown the fastest ever since, are the
countries that educated their children most intensely.5
==========
Pinker)
15:18:30
At the more spiritual end of the range, education brings gifts that go well beyond
practical know-how and economic growth: better education today makes a country more
democratic and peaceful tomorrow.8 The wide-ranging effects of education make it
hard to discern the intervening links in the causal chain from formal schooling to
social harmony.
==========
Pinker)
15:20:02
But some of the causal pathways vindicate the values of the Enlightenment. So much
changes when you get an education! You unlearn dangerous superstitions, such as
that leaders rule by divine right, or that people who don’t look like you are less
than human. You learn that there are other cultures that are as tied to their ways
of life as you are to yours, and for no better or worse reason. You learn that
charismatic saviors have led their countries to disaster. You learn that your own
convictions, no matter how heartfelt or popular, may be mistaken. You learn that
there are better and worse ways to live, and that other people and other cultures
may know things that you don’t. Not least, you learn that there are ways of
resolving conflicts without violence. All these epiphanies militate against
knuckling under the rule of an autocrat or joining a crusade to subdue and kill
your neighbors. Of course, none of this wisdom is guaranteed, particularly when
authorities promulgate their own dogmas, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories
—and, in a backhanded compliment to the power of knowledge, stifle the people and
ideas that might discredit them.
==========
Pinker)
15:20:49
Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more
enlightened. They are less racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and
authoritarian.10 They place a higher value on imagination, independence, and free
speech.11 They are more likely to vote, volunteer, express political views, and
belong to civic associations such as unions, political parties, and religious and
community organizations.12 They are also likelier to trust their fellow citizens—a
prime ingredient of the precious elixir called social capital which gives people
the confidence to contract, invest, and obey the law without fearing that they are
chumps who will be shafted by everyone else.
==========
Pinker)
10:23:08
Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more
enlightened. They are less racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and
authoritarian.10 They place a higher value on imagination, independence, and free
speech.11 They are more likely to vote, volunteer, express political views, and
belong to civic associations such as unions, political parties, and religious and
community organizations.12 They are also likelier to trust their fellow citizens—a
prime ingredient of the precious elixir called social capital which gives people
the confidence to contract, invest, and obey the law without fearing that they are
chumps who will be shafted by everyone else.
==========
Pinker)
10:27:40
Unlike measures of well-being that have a natural floor of zero, like war and
disease, or a natural ceiling of a hundred percent, like nutrition and literacy,
the quest for knowledge is unbounded.
==========
Pinker)
10:27:49
Not only does knowledge itself expand indefinitely, but the premium for knowledge
in an economy that is driven by technology has been soaring.
==========
Pinker)
10:29:04
Most of the world’s knowledge is now online rather than locked in libraries (much
of it free), and massive open online courses (MOOCs) and other forms of distance
learning are becoming available to anyone with a smartphone.
==========
Pinker)
10:32:42
Even more consequentially, the ultimate form of sex discrimination—keeping girls

out of school—is in decline. The change is consequential not just because women
make up half the population, so educating them doubles the size of the skill pool,
but because the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.
==========
Pinker)
10:35:30
For one thing, we know that intelligence is highly heritable,

==========
Pinker)
10:37:00
Not surprisingly, the rise in IQ scores obeys Stein’s Law: Things that can’t go on
forever don’t. The Flynn effect is now petering out in some of the countries in
which it has been going on the longest.32
==========
Pinker)
10:37:55
Food, health, and environmental quality are among the perquisites of a richer
society, and not surprisingly, the Flynn effect is correlated with
==========
Pinker)
10:37:58
Food, health, and environmental quality are among the perquisites of a richer
society, and not surprisingly, the Flynn effect is correlated with increases in GDP
per capita.33
==========
Pinker)
10:43:39
An analytic mindset is inculcated by formal schooling, even if a teacher never

singles it out in a lesson, as long as the curriculum requires understanding and
reasoning rather than rote memorization (and that has been the trend in education
since the early decades of the 20th century).37 Outside the schoolhouse, analytic
thinking is encouraged by a culture that trades in visual symbols (subway maps,
digital displays), analytic tools (spreadsheets, stock reports), and academic
concepts that trickle down into common parlance (supply and demand, on average,
human rights, win-win, correlation versus causation, false positive).
==========
Pinker)
11:27:24
The cognitive act of extricating oneself from the particulars of one’s life and
pondering “There but for fortune go I” or “What would the world be like if everyone
did this?” can be a gateway to compassion and ethics.
==========
Pinker)
11:27:47
Some skeptics (including, at the outset, Flynn himself) doubted whether the 20th
century really produced more brilliant ideas than the ages of Hume, Goethe, and
Darwin.40 Then again, the geniuses of the past had the advantage of exploring
virgin territory. Once
==========
Pinker)
11:27:55
Some skeptics (including, at the outset, Flynn himself) doubted whether the 20th
century really produced more brilliant ideas than the ages of Hume, Goethe, and
Darwin.40 Then again, the geniuses of the past had the advantage of exploring
virgin territory.
==========
Pinker)
11:29:06
But Generation X and the Millennials have famously thrived in the digital realm.
(In one cartoon of the new millennium, a father says to his young boy, “Son, your
mother and I have bought software to control what you see on the Internet. Um . . .
Could you install it for us?”)
==========
Pinker)
11:31:00
United Nations Development Programme, inspired by the economists Mahbub ul Haq and
Amartya Sen, offers a Human Development Index that is a composite of three of the
major ones: life expectancy, GDP per capita, and education (being healthy, wealthy,
and wise).
==========
Pinker)
11:32:13
One is that although the world remains highly unequal, every region has been
improving, and the worst-off parts of the world today are better off than the best-
off parts not long ago.
==========
Pinker)
- Your Note on page 306 | location 4683 | Added on Friday, 11 May 2018 11:33:33
Nepal was better off. Yes true, but with only geology and not human population .
==========
Pinker)
11:33:51
(If we divide the world into the West and the Rest, we find that the Rest in 2007
had reached the level of the West in 1950.)
==========
Pinker)
17:00:01
Once basic needs are satisfied, doesn’t additional affluence just encourage people
to indulge in shallow consumerism?
==========
Pinker)
17:33:58
In Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen sidesteps this trap by proposing that the
ultimate goal of development is to enable people to make choices: strawberries and
cream for those who want them.
==========
Pinker)
17:34:43
One can think of them as the justifiable sources of satisfaction and fulfillment
that human nature makes available to us. Her list begins with capabilities that, as
we have seen, the modern world increasingly allows people to realize: longevity,
health, safety, literacy, knowledge, free expression, and political participation.
It goes on to include aesthetic experience, recreation and play, enjoyment of
nature, emotional attachments, social affiliations, and opportunities to reflect on
and engage in one’s own conception of the good life.
==========
Pinker)
22:00:52
percent.8 Thanks to the labor movement, legislation, and increased worker

productivity, another once-crazy
==========
Pinker)
22:01:00
Thanks to the labor movement, legislation, and increased worker productivity,

another once-crazy pipe dream has become a reality: paid vacations.
==========
Pinker)
- Your Highlight on page 312 | location 4778 | Added on Friday, 11 May 2018
22:04:13
==========
Pinker)
22:07:05
A Babylonian in 1750 BCE would have had to labor fifty hours to spend one hour
reading his cuneiform tablets by a sesame-oil lamp. In 1800, an Englishman had to
toil for six hours to burn a tallow candle for an hour. (Imagine planning your
family budget around that—you might settle for darkness.) In 1880, you’d need to
work fifteen minutes to burn a kerosene lamp for an hour; in 1950, eight seconds
for the same hour from an incandescent bulb; and in 1994, a half-second for the
same hour from a compact fluorescent bulb—a 43,000-fold leap in affordability in
two centuries.
==========
Pinker)
22:07:51
The technology expert Kevin Kelly has proposed that “over time, if a technology
persists long enough, its costs begin to approach (but never reach) zero.”
==========
Pinker)
01:38:57
An analytic mindset is inculcated by formal schooling, even if a teacher never

singles it out in a lesson, as long as the curriculum requires understanding and
reasoning rather than rote memorization (and that has been the trend in education
since the early decades of the 20th century).37 Outside the schoolhouse, analytic
thinking is encouraged by a culture that trades in visual symbols (subway maps,
digital displays), analytic tools (spreadsheets, stock reports), and academic
concepts that trickle down into common parlance (supply and demand, on average,
human rights, win-win, correlation versus causation, false positive).
==========
Pinker)
12:24:05
Sen gave a shout-out to this value in the title of his book on the ultimate goal of
the development of nations: Development as Freedom.
==========
Pinker)
12:24:24
Positive freedom is related to the economist’s notion of utility (what people want;
what they spend their wealth on), and negative freedom to the political scientist’s
notions of democracy and human rights.
==========
Pinker)
14:28:13
This brings us to the other side of well-being, people’s evaluations of how they
are living their lives.
==========
Pinker)
14:29:53
that many of the things that make people happy also make their lives meaningful,
such as being connected to others, feeling productive, and not being alone or
bored.
==========
Pinker)
14:30:42
Happy people live in the present; those with meaningful lives have a narrative
about their past and a plan for the future. Those with happy but meaningless lives
are takers and beneficiaries; those with meaningful but unhappy lives are givers
and benefactors.
==========
Pinker)
14:31:16
Parents get meaning from their children, but not necessarily happiness. Time spent
with friends makes a life happier; time spent with loved ones makes it more
meaningful. Stress, worry, arguments, challenges, and struggles make a life
unhappier but more meaningful. It’s not that people with meaningful lives
masochistically go looking for trouble but that they pursue ambitious goals: “Man
plans and God laughs.” Finally, meaning is about expressing rather than satisfying
the self: it is enhanced by activities that define the person and build a
reputation.
==========
Pinker)
- Your Highlight on page 330 | location 5050-5053 | Added on Tuesday, 15 May 2018
14:42:34
The function of happiness is to goad us into seeking the keys to fitness: when we
are unhappy, we scramble for things that would improve our lot; when we are happy,
we cherish the status quo. Meaning, in contrast, registers the novel and expansive
goals that are opened up for us as social, brainy, and talkative occupants of the
uniquely human cognitive niche.
==========
Pinker)
14:44:38
Thoreau was a victim of the Optimism Gap (the “I’m OK, They’re Not” illusion),
which for happiness is more like a canyon. People in every country underestimate
the proportion of their compatriots who say they are happy, by an average of 42
percentage points.
==========
Pinker)
14:49:56
The World Happiness Report 2016 found three other traits that go with national
happiness: social support (whether people say they have friends or relatives they
can count on in times of trouble), generosity (whether they donate money to
charity), and corruption (whether they perceive the businesses in their country as
corrupt).28 We cannot conclude, though, that these traits cause greater happiness.
==========
Pinker)
14:50:01
The World Happiness Report 2016 found three other traits that go with national
happiness: social support (whether people say they have friends or relatives they
can count on in times of trouble), generosity (whether they donate money to
charity), and corruption (whether they perceive the businesses in their country as
corrupt).28
==========
Pinker)
14:55:01
People tend to get happier as they get older (an age effect), presumably because
they overcome the hurdles of embarking on adulthood and develop the wisdom to cope
with setbacks and to put their lives in perspective.38 (They may pass through a
midlife crisis on the way, or take a final slide in the last years of old age.)
==========
Pinker)
14:56:20
a week, afraid to ask for shorter hours lest he be replaced. When my young parents
protested on his behalf, he was given sporadic days off (which the owner no doubt
perceived, like Scrooge, as “a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket”), until
better labor-law enforcement gave him a predictable six-day workweek. Figure 17-1:
Work hours, Western Europe and US, 1870–2000 Source: Roser 2016t, based on data
from Huberman & Minns 2007 on full-time production workers (both sexes)
==========
20:41:59
The Nationalists called this Guóyǔ, “the national language.” The Communists called
it Pǔtōnghuà, “the common speech.”
==========
20:44:06
It was called Báihuà, literally, “white language” or “plain language,” and it made
literature newly accessible to ordinary people.
==========
00:48:00
A stable, well-functioning liberal democracy involves the interaction of a number

of different institutions: not just elections for a president or legislature but
also well-organized political parties, an independent court system, an effective
state bureaucracy, and a free and vigilant media.
==========
09:58:08
We are a good team, a dānwèi.

==========
- Your Highlight on page 109 | location 1663 | Added on Wednesday, 16 May 2018
10:02:06
==========
10:05:03
Defenders of characters point out their merits. Many Chinese people respect
characters for their ancient history and all the mysteries they embody. Today, the
writing system works amazingly well to unite everyone in modern polyglot China. No
matter what dialect they speak or how heavy their accent, all people can look at
the same characters and derive the same meaning—even though they might pronounce
the characters and words very differently. Chinese TV makes good use of this;
nearly everything spoken on TV carries written subtitles. So TV watchers can cut
through the differences of mutually unintelligible Mandarin, Cantonese or
Shanghainese dialect, or the heavy southern accents to read the same characters and
“understand” what is being said.
==========
11:19:03
When Chinese people get stalled in a conversation and need to clarify a homonym,
you often see the speaker scribbling out the shape of a character, “writing” on the
palm of his or her hand with a finger if there’s no pen or paper available, to
illustrate its meaning to the listener.
==========
Pinker)
18:43:23
Though people have reallocated their time because families are smaller, more people
are single, and more women work, Americans today spend as much time with relatives,
have the same median number of friends and see them about as often, report as much
emotional support, and remain as satisfied with the number and quality of their
friendships as their counterparts in the decade of Gerald Ford and Happy Days.
==========
Pinker)
18:44:40
Since these students were not tracked after they left school, we don’t know whether
the decline in loneliness is a period effect, in which it has become steadily
easier for young people to satisfy their social needs, or a cohort effect, in which
recent generations are more socially satisfied and will remain
==========
Pinker)
18:44:47
Since these students were not tracked after they left school, we don’t know whether
the decline in loneliness is a period effect, in which it has become steadily
easier for young people to satisfy their social needs, or a cohort effect, in which
recent generations are more socially satisfied and will remain so.
==========
Pinker)
19:25:51
Everyone occasionally suffers from depression, and some people are stricken with
major depression, in which the sadness and hopelessness last more than two weeks
and interfere with carrying on with life.
==========
Pinker)
08:53:33
In her 2013 article “Abnormal Is the New Normal,” the psychologist Robin Rosenberg
noted that the latest version of the DSM could diagnose half the American
population with
==========
Pinker)
08:53:58
In her 2013 article “Abnormal Is the New Normal,” the psychologist Robin Rosenberg
noted that the latest version of the DSM could diagnose half the American
population with a mental disorder over the course of their lives.66
==========
09:15:37
Masses of former peasants left the countryside for cities, where they were
available to recruitment by new political parties and susceptible to appeals based
on identity politics.
==========
09:16:37
Samuel Huntington argued in Political Order in Changing Societies that the middle
classes are critical to political change.
==========
09:17:00
Revolutions, he noted, are never organized by the poorest of the poor, because they
have neither the resources nor the education to organize effectively. The middle
classes, by contrast, are the group most likely to have experienced rapid increases
in their social status and therefore face the sharpest disappointment if their
subsequent mobility is blocked. It is the gap between their expectations and
reality that creates political instability.
==========
09:18:11
A new middle class was not the only product of urbanization, however. In many
respects, the rise of political Islam in the Middle East can more appropriately be
seen as a form of identity politics than as a matter of revived religiosity per se,
and as such has displaced class as a rallying cry for the mobilization of political
outsiders.
==========
00:49:14
shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, from traditional villages to modern

cities, that Europe experienced in the late nineteenth century, with all of the
anomie and identity confusion that such a shift entails.
==========
00:49:36
For a generation after independence from colonialism, secular nationalism worked as

a source of identity, but it was discredited by the late 1970s by its failure to
produce consistent and shared economic growth, and by its political failure in
dealing with issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
==========
00:50:00
One of the reasons for the strength of political Islam today is that it can speak
to issues of identity, religion, and social class simultaneously.
==========
00:51:59
The European experience in 1848 indicates, however, that the initial toppling of an
authoritarian regime and the organization of democratic elections is only the
beginning of a much longer process of political development.
==========
00:52:16
Democracy is built around the institutionalization of mass participation in an

agreed political process, which requires in the first instance well-organized
political parties.
==========
- Your Bookmark on page 491 | location 7516 | Added on Friday, 18 May 2018 00:52:32
==========
00:54:25
suffrage.
==========
00:56:18
A large number of Muslim-majority societies have had to contend with militant and
antidemocratic Islamist groups; there was no equivalent threat to the Third Wave
democratic transitions in Eastern Europe or Latin America.
==========
00:56:29
number of observers have suggested that Islam itself constitutes an insuperable

obstacle to the emergence of democracy, since it has never accepted the principle
of the separation of church and state, and harbors a long tradition of violent
religious militancy.
==========
00:56:50
Islamist organizations like Ennahda in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt
that have played by democratic rules are often accused of using democracy
instrumentally to gain power; their real agenda remains creation of illiberal
theocratic states.
==========
00:58:11
Although there is an egalitarian doctrine at the heart of Christianity (as there is

in Islam), Christian churches aligned themselves with authoritarian rulers and
justified illiberal orders over the centuries. Part of the story of the Third Wave
of democratizations
==========
00:58:17
Although there is an egalitarian doctrine at the heart of Christianity (as there is

in Islam), Christian churches aligned themselves with authoritarian rulers and
justified illiberal orders over the centuries. Part of the story of the Third Wave
of democratizations in Europe and Latin America has to do with the reinterpretation
of Catholic doctrine after Vatican II in the 1960s to make it compatible with
modern democracy.
==========
00:58:30
So too with radical Islam. It seems likely that its current expansion is due more
to the social conditions of contemporary Middle Eastern societies than to the
intrinsic nature of the religion.
==========
00:59:17
Gellner, it will be recalled, argued that nationalism is a response to the identity

dislocation that occurs as societies modernize and transition from Gesellschaft—the
small village—to Gemeinschaft—the large city. It occurs primarily in modernizing
countries, where the narrow old forms of identity based on kinship and locality
disappear and are replaced by more universalist doctrines linking individuals to
broader cultural movements.
==========
Himalayan Voices - Hutt, Michael James
- Your Highlight on page xi-xi | Added on Friday, 18 May 2018 09:28:32
subsequently adopted was to provide an introduction to the works of a f a i r ly

limited number of imp o r t a nt Nepa li poets. At a later stage it dawned on me
that a l though Nepa li short stories contain a wealth of i n t e r e s t i ng ma t
e r i a l, many are simply less compe l l ing in a strictly literary sense than are
the more highly developed poetic genres. Each poet who is the subject of a separate
chapter in Part One of this book has been chosen for reasons of s igni f i c anc e,
and the importance of the cont r ibut ion each has made to Nepali poetry is
explained in an int roduc tory preamble to the selection of translated poems. The f
a r ther back into the historical past one ventur e s, the easier it becomes to
assess the impor t ance of i n d i v i d u al poets. Thus, it is u n l
==========
Himalayan Voices (Hutt, Michael James)
- Your Bookmark on page 2 | location 18 | Added on Friday, 18 May 2018 10:55:45
==========
00:14:56
People are too busy with earning money to exist.”

==========
00:26:44
Some Fuling men allowed their pinkie nails to grow a full two inches, because this
was a sign that they didn’t do manual labor. A number of my male students had nails
like this, which looked absurdly feminine on hands that clearly had been toughened
by work in the fields.
==========
00:27:57
was clear that men controlled most of the money—they were quicker to earn it,
quicker to spend it, and quicker to talk about it. They had more opportunities than
the women, who were less likely to go into business or find lucrative independent
jobs like driving a cab. In the end, money simply meant more to the men. I had
trouble imagining what Fuling men had been like before Reform and Opening, because
money struck me as such a fundamental part of their identity.
==========
00:35:32
After a year in the city, I found that I least enjoyed associating with one
particular socioeconomic group: the young moneyed male. There were exceptions, of
course, but when I tried to define the average person from this group, I saw a man
driven by a set of goals and aspirations that were so narrow they became a sort of
caricature of showy masculinity. He tended to be passionate about acquiring beepers
and cell phones, and he worked hard to accumulate increasingly advanced videodisc
players and karaoke machines. He smoked Magnificent Sound cigarettes constantly. He
tended to be loud, and he was very conscious of face, carrying himself with a
certain swagger. On weekends he sometimes engaged in senseless drinking
competitions with his male friends, challenging each other to shot after shot of
baijiu. If he wanted some illicit excitement, he found prostitutes at a karaoke bar
or a beauty parlor.
==========
00:35:51
realized that this was an unfairly narrow prejudice, and during my second year in
Fuling I became friends with several wealthy young men who didn’t match this
stereotype. But nevertheless I found that it was easiest to make friends from the
middle and lower classes.
==========
00:38:03
Alcohol was always a viable excuse for bad male behavior in Fuling.
==========
00:38:38
During our second year, Adam and I both became tired of the banquet routine—the
senseless competitive drinking, the constant bullying, the baijiu strategy. It had
been entertaining during the first year, largely because we had so few social
outlets, and some of the banquets were among my most humorous memories. But they
were also some of the most embarrassing.
==========
00:41:31
Generally it was the result of men trying to be macho: if I saw three young men
walking toward me, I could be almost certain that one of them would shout something
at me to impress his friends. In that sense it was similar to any sort of
harassment in America, which typically comes from young men, but in Fuling it was
far more routine.
==========
00:45:49
People in Fuling spoke of san pei xiaojie—“three-with girls,” who worked in karaoke
halls. Men could drink with them, sing karaoke with them, and dance with them. And
for enough money some of the three-with girls would perform a fourth “with,”
sleeping with the customer.
==========
00:48:27
tou hanzi—“stole men.”

==========
00:50:11
Other aspects of Chinese were even more bluntly sexist. If you wanted to call a
woman a bitch, you could say that she “stunk three-eight,” because March 8 is
International Women’s Day.
==========
00:55:15
Being different wasn’t liberating, as it sometimes is in America, and this was

especially true for women from a peasant background, who were unlikely to feel
comfortable ignoring the opinions of others and blazing new ground.
==========
00:55:28
The result was that they became outsiders not so much by choice as by helpless
inclination, which naturally made them feel that they were the ones at fault.
==========
00:56:06
Peasant women saw their husbands go off in search of work, gaining financial
security but leaving their spouses isolated, and sometimes this loneliness
destroyed them. Women could earn money themselves; this was a way of becoming
independent, but a career could also result in the frustration of sexism and the
criticism of people who felt that a woman shouldn’t strive in this way.
==========
00:59:36
That was what I liked the most about Fei Xiaoyun—she didn’t feel the need to lie to
me just because I was a waiguoren.
==========
11:55:02
To make a big purchase, you pay from your own savings, or you borrow from family
and friends—or, if the money can’t be found, you don’t buy at all.
==========
11:59:47
Almost anybody in America who has made a rise like Teacher Kong’s would be full of
the confidence—and perhaps the arrogance—of the self-made man, but it is
characteristically Chinese that such pride is completely absent. He rarely talks
about his background, and he never emphasizes its difficulty, because he knows that
things easily could have been worse.
==========
12:02:38
huangtong, so ridiculous.
==========
Hillbilly Elegy (J. D. Vance)
19:09:56
Whatever talents I have, I almost squandered until a handful of loving people

rescued me.
==========
19:13:46
I once held this opinion myself, and I very desperately wanted to believe it during
my youth.
==========
19:20:21
I asked my sister to read an earlier draft, that draft ignited a thirty-minute

conversation about whether I had misplaced an event chronologically. I left my
version in, not because I suspect my sister’s memory is faulty (in fact, I imagine
hers is better than mine), but because I think there is something to learn in how
I’ve organized the events in my own mind.
==========
19:45:32
Mamaw shielded me from the worst of Jackson, but you can keep reality at bay only
so long.
==========
19:47:23
The people are physically unhealthy, and without government assistance they lack
treatment for the most basic problems. Most important, they’re mean about it—they
will hesitate to open their lives up to others for the simple reason that they
don’t wish to be judged.
==========
19:47:41
“Mountain Dew mouth”: painful dental problems in young children, generally caused
by too much sugary soda.
==========
19:48:40
Their paper suggests that hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with
uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist.
==========
20:51:26
you can take the boy out of Kentucky, but you can’t take Kentucky out of the boy.
==========
01:07:26
He warned that if Jimmy got a full-time job out of high school, the money would be
like a drug—it would feel good in the short term, but it would keep him from the
things he ought to be doing.
==========
12:45:54
street that was once the pride of Middletown today serves as a meeting spot for
druggies and dealers. Main Street is now the place you avoid after dark. This
change is a symptom of a new economic reality: rising residential segregation.
==========
16:57:59
To them, the American Dream required forward momentum. Manual labor was honorable
work, but it was their generation’s work—we had to do something different. To move
up was to move on. That required going to college.
==========
17:00:46
worked in her life—was an obvious exception.

==========
17:00:55
People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown. You can walk
through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a
week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.
==========
12:33:35
Mamaw often told a parable: A young man was sitting at home when a terrible
rainstorm began. Within hours, the man’s house began to flood, and someone came to
his door offering a ride to higher ground. The man declined, saying, “God will take
care of me.” A few hours later, as the waters engulfed the first floor of the man’s
home, a boat passed by, and the captain offered to take the man to safety. The man
declined, saying, “God will take care of me.” A few hours after that, as the man
waited on his roof—his entire home flooded—a helicopter flew by, and the pilot
offered transportation to dry land. Again the man declined, telling the pilot that
God would care for him. Soon thereafter, the waters overcame the man, and as he
stood before God in heaven, he protested his fate: “You promised that you’d help me
so long as I was faithful.” God replied, “I sent you a car, a boat, and a
helicopter. Your death is your own fault.” God helps those who help themselves.
This was the wisdom of the Book of Mamaw.
==========
19:07:53
she was muttering something through the tears

==========
02:29:18
We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study when we’re parents.
Our kids perform poorly in school. We might get angry with them, but we never give
them the tools—like peace and quiet at home—to succeed. Even the best and brightest
will likely go to college close to home, if they survive the war zone in their own
home.
==========
17:02:17
Excitement turned to apprehension, but I reminded myself that college was an

investment in my future. “It’s the only damned thing worth spending money on right
now,” Mamaw said. She was right, but as I worried less about the financial aid
forms, I began to worry for another reason: I wasn’t ready. Not all investments are
good investments. All of that debt, and for what? To get drunk all the time and
earn terrible grades? Doing well in college required grit, and I had far too little
of
==========
17:02:24

earn terrible grades? Doing well in college
==========
17:02:28

earn terrible grades? Doing well in college required grit, and I had far too little
of
==========
17:15:57
Those who dropped out—mostly for medical reasons—served to reinforce the worthiness
of the challenge.
==========
17:31:11
mountain roads, to deliver Mamaw to the family

==========
17:31:16
I’ve made that drive with a funeral convoy probably half a dozen times, and every
turn reveals a landscape that inspires some memory of fonder times. It’s impossible
to sit in the car for the twenty-minute trip and not trade stories about the
departed, all of which start out “Do you remember that time . . .
==========
17:35:12
I don’t believe in epiphanies. I don’t believe in transformative moments, as

transformation is harder than a moment. I’ve seen far too many people awash in a
genuine desire to change only to lose their mettle when they realized just how
difficult change actually is.
==========
17:37:22
We used to complain constantly about the biggest perceived difference between our
jobs and civilian jobs: In the civilian world, your boss wasn’t able to control
your life after you left work.
==========
17:37:41
We used to complain constantly about the biggest perceived difference between our
jobs and civilian jobs: In the civilian world, your boss wasn’t able to control
your life after you left work. In the Marines, my boss didn’t just make sure I did
a good job, he made sure I kept my room clean, kept my hair cut, and ironed my
uniforms. He sent an older marine to supervise as I shopped for my first car so
that I’d end up with a practical car, like a Toyota or a Honda, not the BMW I
wanted. When I nearly agreed to finance that purchase directly through the car
dealership with a 21-percent-interest-rate loan, my chaperone blew a gasket and
ordered me to call Navy Fed and get a second quote (it was less than half the
interest).
==========
18:46:35
Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a
loser; it’s the government’s fault.
==========
21:03:59
I’d become an expert at leaving Middletown for other places, and each time I felt
at least a little forlorn.
==========
21:15:14
with—like my professor who suggested that Yale Law School shouldn’t accept
applicants from non-prestigious state schools. There’s no way to quantify how these
attitudes affect the working class.
==========
21:17:09
public health crisis. These aren’t exactly major problems, and if given the option
all over again, I’d trade a bit of social discomfort for the life I lead in a
heartbeat.
==========
21:17:17
But as I realized that in this new world I was the cultural alien, I began to think
seriously about questions that had nagged at me since I was a teenager:
==========
21:22:04
head.” I had never met anyone like her. I had dated other girls before, some
serious, some not. But Usha occupied an entirely different emotional universe. I
thought about her constantly. One friend described me as “heartsick” and another
told me he had never seen me like this.
==========
21:22:59
went to Yale to earn a law degree. But that first year at Yale taught me most of
all that I didn’t know how the world worked.
==========
00:20:42
I was a third-generation escaper.

==========
07:42:34
People sometimes ask whether I think there’s anything we can do to “solve” the
problems of my community. I know what they’re looking for: a magical public policy
solution or an innovative government program. But these problems of family, faith,
and culture aren’t like a Rubik’s Cube, and I don’t think that solutions (as most
understand the term) really exist.
==========
07:42:48
good friend, who worked for a time in the White House and cares deeply about the
plight of the working class, once told me, “The best way to look at this might be
to recognize that you probably can’t fix these things. They’ll always be around.
But maybe you can put your thumb on the scale a little for the people at the
margins.”
==========
07:49:47
In a paper analyzing the data, Chetty and his coauthors noted two important factors
that explained the uneven geographic distribution of opportunity: the prevalence of
single parents and income segregation.
==========
18:38:22
So I think that any successful policy program would recognize what my old high
school’s teachers see every day: that the real problem for so many of these kids is
what happens (or doesn’t happen) at home.
==========
18:39:44
associated accomplishments in school with femininity. Manliness meant strength,

courage, a willingness to fight, and, later, success with girls. Boys who got good
grades were “sissies” or “faggots.” I don’t know where I got this feeling.
Certainly not from Mamaw, who demanded good grades, nor from Papaw. But it was
there, and studies now show that working-class boys like me do much worse in school
because they view schoolwork as a feminine endeavor. Can you change this with a new
law or program? Probably not. Some scales aren’t that amenable to the proverbial
thumb.
==========
18:53:26
Are we tough enough to build a church that forces kids like me to engage with the
world rather than withdraw from
==========
18:53:34
Are we tough enough to build a church that forces kids like me to engage with the
world rather than withdraw from it? Are we tough enough to look ourselves in the
mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children?
==========
18:54:15
These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We

created them, and only we can fix them.
==========
18:54:39
We don’t need to live like the elites of California, New York, or Washington, D.C.
We don’t need to work a hundred hours a week at law firms and investment banks. We
don’t need to socialize at cocktail parties. We do need to create a space for the
J.D.s and Brians of the world to have a chance. I don’t know what the answer is,
precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless
companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.
==========
18:56:09
In different versions, the antagonist changes form. It has been a Marine Corps
drill instructor, a barking dog, a movie villain, and a mean teacher.
==========
How to Change Your Mind (Michael Pollan)
18:59:44
There were people who compared the two events and made much of the cosmic
synchronicity.
==========
19:00:58
Called teonanácatl by the Aztecs, or “flesh of the gods,” the mushroom was brutally
suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church after the Spanish conquest and driven
underground.
==========
19:02:50
For most of the 1950s and early 1960s, many in the psychiatric establishment
regarded LSD and psilocybin as miracle drugs. The arrival
==========
19:02:55
regarded LSD and psilocybin as miracle drugs. The arrival
==========
19:03:01
regarded LSD and psilocybin as miracle drugs.
==========
19:44:35
A new generation of scientists, many of them inspired by their own personal

experience of the compounds, are testing their potential to heal mental illnesses
such as depression, anxiety, trauma, and addiction.
==========
19:45:03
One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what
happens. By smashing atoms, a particle accelerator forces them to yield their
secrets. By administering psychedelics in carefully calibrated doses,
neuroscientists can profoundly disturb the normal waking consciousness of
volunteers, dissolving the structures of the self and occasioning what can be
described as a mystical experience.
==========
19:46:07
Everything I was learning about the third-person history of psychedelic research

made me want to explore this novel landscape of the mind in the first person too—to
see how the changes in consciousness these molecules wrought actually feel and
what, if anything, they had to teach me about my mind and might contribute to my
life.
==========
19:48:02
I’m less a child of the psychedelic 1960s than of the moral panic that psychedelics
provoked.
==========
19:48:50
and then sailed off on four or five interesting hours in the company of each other
and what felt like a wonderfully italicized version of the familiar reality.
==========
19:50:07
Set is the mind-set or expectation one brings to the experience, and setting is the
environment in which it takes place.
==========
19:51:25
I’ve begun to wonder if perhaps these remarkable molecules might be wasted on the
young, that they may have more to offer us later in life, after the cement of our
mental habits and everyday behaviors has set.
==========
19:51:30
Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to
have an “experience of the numinous” to help them negotiate the second half of
their lives. By the time I arrived safely in my fifties, life
==========
19:51:37
Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to
have an “experience of the numinous” to help them negotiate the second half of
their lives.
==========
19:59:30
“Individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and

experience ego-free states,” one of the researchers was quoted as
==========
19:59:33
“Individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and

experience ego-free states,”
==========
20:00:06
I was engrossed in a different conversation at the time, but as soon as the

phonemes L-S-D drifted down to my end of the table, I couldn’t help but cup my ear
(literally) and try to tune
==========
20:00:12
I was engrossed in a different conversation at the time, but as soon as the

phonemes L-S-D drifted down to my end of the table, I couldn’t help but cup my ear
(literally) and try to tune in.
==========
00:56:26
I was surprised to learn that psychedelics are far more frightening to people than
they are dangerous.
==========
00:59:44
Each of us develops our shorthand ways of slotting and processing everyday

experiences and solving problems, and while this is no doubt adaptive—it helps us
get the job done with a minimum of fuss—eventually it becomes rote. It dulls us.
The muscles of attention atrophy.
==========
01:00:36
The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present
moment.
==========
08:09:23
Maryland—sensitive ears could make out the sound of ice beginning to crack.
==========
08:16:58
Yet Hofmann also came to regard the youth culture’s adoption of LSD in the 1960s as
an understandable response to the emptiness of what he described as a materialist,
industrialized, and spiritually impoverished society that had lost its connection
to nature.
==========
08:28:14
Griffiths had always been interested in what philosophers call phenomenology—the

subjective experience of consciousness.
==========
08:30:28
experience—why did he feel compelled to drink coffee every day?—and turn it into a
productive line of scientific inquiry. But he could see no way to do that with his
deepening
==========
08:30:33
experience—why did he feel compelled to drink coffee every day?—and turn it into a
productive line of scientific inquiry.
==========
12:45:29
fervently
==========
20:22:53
had said, that the idea that brains create consciousness—an idea accepted without
question by most scientists—“is a
==========
20:22:59
had said, that the idea that brains create consciousness—an idea accepted without
question by most scientists—“is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact.”
==========
20:23:57
the noetic quality.

==========
20:31:13
“the betterment of well people.”

==========
20:39:48
Grof, who has guided thousands of LSD sessions, once predicted that psychedelics
“would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology or the telescope is for
astronomy.
==========
20:45:36
absence from Oracle.” Within a year, Jesse would launch the Council on Spiritual
Practices, and within two the council would convene its own meeting at Esalen, in
January 1996, with the aim of opening a second front in the campaign to resurrect
psychedelics. Fittingly,
==========
23:53:29
The bourgeoisie who ran this system could not, despite their wealth, consume
everything that it produced, while the proletariat whose labor made it possible
were too poor to buy its products.
==========
23:53:47
The only way out of this crisis, according to Marx, was a revolution that would
give political power to the proletariat and redistribute the fruits of the
capitalist system.1
==========
23:56:31
climate wasn’t healthy, but mostly I was run down by the pressures of daily life as
a waiguoren. It was tiring always to be the center of attention, and being a
foreigner meant that you were more likely to attract complications.
==========
00:00:16
But by isolating me, the department authorities had simply pushed me to become
something else, and now even if they changed their minds I would never trade the
life I had for English-speaking friendships. During the holiday I was the only
waiguoren in the city, but for the first time I no longer thought of myself as
being alone.
==========
00:02:14
Downtown Fuling glowed bright across the river in the evenings. The city streets
were strung with red lanterns and strands of electric lights, and all of the trees
were decorated. The small park at South Mountain Gate had been turned into a riot
of color—its coal-stained shrubs and trees were covered with lights, dazzling in
the heart of the city. Crowds gathered to look at the park and take photographs.
==========
00:03:15
These lights had been wired carelessly and sometimes they exploded and caught fire,
the tree shining proudly with a sudden burst of flame and smoke. The pedestrians
would stop to watch, chattering and laughing, and after the flame died—the tree
hissing softly, the smoke drifting upward—they kept walking through the brilliant
city.
==========
00:07:07
chaoji
==========
23:12:33
There was a great deal of generosity in their having me over for dinner. They had
known that the child would cry and possibly offend me, but they had invited me
anyway.
==========
23:13:37
point about xenophobia, or anything like that. They knew that I was alone on the
holiday, and I was their friend; nothing else mattered. They were simply big-
hearted people and that was the best meal I ever had in China.
==========
23:29:59
They made good money—piles of five- and ten-yuan notes. It said a great deal about
the Chinese respect for education that you could make money that way; I couldn’t
imagine getting any response in America to such a scam. At least it seemed to be a
scam; over the last couple of weeks I had noticed that two of the boys were
obviously working together, sharing a uniform and identification. They alternated
days, and I could always spot the other one watching while his friend begged. My
impression was that in the heart of the holiday they easily pulled in more than one
hundred yuan a day.
==========
09:36:18
We’ve got five crayons when we need fifty thousand different shades.”
==========
09:43:50
the reason R. Gordon Wasson had to rediscover magic mushrooms in Mexico was that
the Spanish had suppressed them so effectively, deeming them dangerous instruments
of paganism.
==========
09:45:22
were able to obtain permission to give it to healthy

==========
09:49:19
That said, Griffiths went to great lengths in the design of the study to control
for “expectancy effects.”
==========
09:50:46
“TLO—Trust, Let Go, Be Open.” Some guides like to quote John Lennon: “Turn off your
mind, relax and float downstream.”
==========
09:51:24
Volunteers are quizzed: “If you see a door, what do you do? If you see a staircase,
what do you do?” “Open it” and “climb up it” are of course the right answers. This
careful
==========
09:51:31
Volunteers are quizzed: “If you see a door, what do you do? If you see a staircase,
what do you do?” “Open it” and “climb up it” are of course the right answers.
==========
09:52:09
of the volunteer, the skills and worldviews of the sitters, Bill Richards’s flight
instructions, the decor of the room, the inward focus encouraged by the eyeshades
and the music (and the music itself, much of which to my ears sounds notably
religious), and, though they might not be pleased to hear it, the minds of the
designers of the experiments.
==========
09:52:42
my ears sounds notably religious), and, though they might not be pleased to hear
it, the minds of the designers of the experiments. The sheer suggestibility of
psychedelics is one of their defining characteristics,
==========
09:54:27
and I became the music for a while.

==========
09:54:48
It was a review—something about the trajectory of my life. All these people had
made me what I had become.” Amy Charnay, a nutritionist and
==========
09:54:52
It was a review—something about the trajectory of my life. All these people had
made me what I had become.”
==========
10:03:54
Yet people come out of the experience understanding these platitudes in a new way;
what was merely known is now felt, takes on the authority of a deeply rooted
conviction.
==========
10:04:37
presence, she recalled, “every one of my chakras was exploding. And then there was
this light, it was the pure light of love and divinity,
==========
10:05:53
This sense of having temporarily surrendered to a superior force often leaves the
person feeling as if he or she has been permanently transformed.
==========
10:08:00
“now I had the motivation, because I had tasted the destination”;

==========
13:27:13
As I paged through the issue in bed that evening, the world of 1957 seemed like a
faraway planet, even though I lived on it, albeit as a two-year-old.
==========
13:29:31
They concluded that each Indo-European people is by cultural inheritance either

mycophobic (for example, the Anglo-Saxons, Celts, and Scandinavians) or mycophilic
(the Russians, Catalans, and Slavs)
==========
13:34:46
In 1620, the Roman Catholic Church declared that the use of plants for divination
was “an act of superstition condemned as opposed to the purity and integrity of our
Holy Catholic Faith.”
==========
13:35:17
took an act of faith to believe that eating the bread and wine of the Eucharist
gave the worshipper access to the divine, an access that had to be mediated by a
priest and the church liturgy. Compare that with the Aztec sacrament, a
psychoactive mushroom that granted anyone who ate it direct, unmediated access to
the divine—to visions of another world, a realm of the gods.
==========
13:35:27
the divine—to visions of another world, a realm of the gods. So who had the more
powerful sacrament? As a Mazatec Indian told Wasson,
==========
13:35:32
the divine—to visions of another world, a realm of the gods. So who had the more
powerful sacrament? As a Mazatec Indian told Wasson, the mushrooms “carry you there
where god is.”
==========
13:38:02
felt that I was now seeing plain, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect
view.”
==========
13:38:13
on both Wasson’s prose and his perceptions: “I felt that I was now seeing plain,
whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect view.”
==========
13:38:18
“I felt that I was now seeing plain, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect
view.”
==========
13:41:02
Wasson was distorting a complex indigenous practice in order to fit a preconceived

theory and conflating the historical significance of that practice with its
contemporary meaning.
==========
13:46:26
Though reading is no substitute for hearing

==========
13:53:58
says that like many psilocybin species “azzies

==========
13:54:08
Look at where we are: at the edge of the continent, the edge of an ecosystem, the
edge of civilization, and of course these mushrooms bring us to the edge of
consciousness.”
==========
15:20:06
Fuling changed every month: new buildings sprouted like a forest of fresh white
tile and blue glass, and then a month later the buildings aged prematurely as coal
stains started creeping down from the roofs. Everywhere in China, people were
building; the cities were growing, changing entities, more alive than the
countryside; and I always imagined an entire nation rising at once, a China locked
by scaffolding rather than the Great Wall.
==========
23:18:13
and “brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and
imagination.”
==========
23:27:51
In a book called Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to
Alter Consciousness, Samorini hypothesizes that during times of rapid environmental
change or crisis it may avail the survival of a group when a few of its members
abandon their accustomed conditioned responses and experiment with some radically
new and different behaviors. Much like genetic mutations, most of these
==========
23:28:01
In a book called Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to
Alter Consciousness, Samorini hypothesizes that during times of rapid environmental
change or crisis it may avail the survival of a group when a few of its members
abandon their accustomed conditioned responses and experiment with some radically
new and different behaviors.
==========
23:28:07
disastrous and be discarded by natural selection. But the laws of probability

suggest that a few of the novel behaviors might end up being useful, helping the
individual, the group, and possibly the species to adapt to rapid changes in their
environment.
==========
23:28:21
“depatterning factor.”
==========
23:34:27
Instead of seeing nature as a collection of discrete objects, the Romantic

scientists—and I include Stamets in their number—saw a densely tangled web of
subjects, each acting on the other in the great dance that would come to be called
coevolution. “Everything,” Humboldt said, “is interaction and reciprocal.”
==========
23:34:52
view—perspectives that depend as much on imagination as observation.

==========
08:09:03
And so I thought about all they had given me, and about all that time had done to
them, and what was going to become of this prospect, this place (this me!), when
they finally fell, as eventually they would.
==========
08:12:12
The psilocin in that mushroom unlocked the 5-hydroxytryptamine 2-A receptors in my

brain, causing them to fire wildly and set off a cascade of disordered mental
events that, among other things, permitted some thoughts and feelings, presumably
from my subconscious (and, perhaps, my reading too), to get cross-wired with my
visual cortex as it was processing images of the trees and plants and insects in my
field of vision.
==========
08:16:21
“Whenever you are photographed, smile. Wave reassuringly. Radiate courage. Never
complain or appear angry. It’s okay if you come off as flamboyant and eccentric.
You’re a professor after all. But a confident attitude is the best advertisement.
You must be known for your smile.”
==========
08:22:32
A straightforward question, and yet the answer is complicated by the very nature of
these drugs, which is anything but straightforward.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 132 | location 2022-2022 | Added on Wednesday, 6 June 2018
00:00:10
“enter the illness and see with a madman’s eyes, hear with his ears, and feel with
his skin.”
==========
00:07:52
Could it be that the doctors were mistaking transcendence for insanity?

==========
00:11:05
in a spirit that was generally more cooperative than competitive.

==========
00:14:57
Freud called dreams “the royal road” to the subconscious, bypassing the gates of
both the ego and the superego, yet the road has plenty of ruts and potholes:
patients don’t always remember their dreams, and when they do recall them, it is
often imperfectly. Drugs like LSD and psilocybin promised a better route into the
subconscious.
==========
10:40:41
consciousness—the plot of his most famous novel, Brave New World (1932), turns on a
mind-control drug he called soma—as well as mysticism, paranormal perception,
reincarnation, UFOs, and so
==========
10:42:30
This other world is always present but in ordinary moments is kept from our
awareness by the “reducing valve” of everyday waking consciousness, a kind of
mental filter that admits only “a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness” we
need in order to survive.
==========
10:44:00
One person’s “depersonalization” could be another’s “sense of oneness”; it was all

a matter of perspective and vocabulary.
==========
10:44:51
Osmond’s neologism married two Greek words that together mean “mind manifesting.”
==========
10:55:08
One patient he treated in Vancouver, an alcoholic paralyzed by social anxiety,

recalled Hubbard handing him a bouquet of roses during an LSD session: “He said,
‘Now hate them.’ They withered and the petals fell off, and I started to cry. Then
he said, ‘Love them,’ and they came back brighter and even more spectacular than
before. That meant a lot to me. I realized that you can make your relationships
anything you want. The trouble I was having with people was coming from me.”
==========
10:57:09
For Hubbard, psychedelic therapy was a form of philanthropy, and he drained his
fortune advancing the cause.
==========
11:07:23
(And have it still: I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses
psychedelics in its management training. A handful of others have instituted
“microdosing Fridays.”)
==========
13:01:15
somehow “stuck” in their work on a particular project.

==========
21:48:47
as if they were pioneers exploring an unmapped frontier of consciousness and the

previous decade of work surveying the psychedelic landscape had never happened.
==========
21:51:50
double-blind psychology experiment.

==========
21:54:08
encouraged in his shift from scientist to evangelist by some of the

==========
21:54:43
America had run out of philosophy, that a new, empirical, tangible meta-physics was
desperately needed.”
==========
21:56:22
(It is one of the many paradoxes of psychedelics that these drugs can sponsor an
ego-dissolving experience that in some people quickly leads to massive ego
inflation. Having been let in on a great secret of the universe, the recipient of
this knowledge is bound to feel special, chosen for great things.)
==========
21:58:55
You know what the conclusions are to be . . . and the data are simply used to
support what you already know to be true.”
==========
22:02:07
They predicted that “a major civil liberties issue of the next decade will be the
control and expansion of consciousness.”
==========
23:48:38
“The thing that impressed me is, on one hand he looked like a carpetbagger con man,
and on the other he had these most impressive people in the world in his lap,
basically backing him.”
==========
23:52:42
Leary and Ram Dass. (Two years after his departure from Harvard, Alpert embarked on
a spiritual journey to India and returned as Ram Dass.)
==========
00:03:49
with the result that the loudest and most authoritative voices in the debate over
psychedelics during the 1960s were precisely the people who knew the least about
them.
==========
08:10:07
Man is about to make use of that fabulous electrical network he carries around in
his skull. Present social establishments had better be prepared for the change. Our
favorite concepts are standing in the way of a floodtide, two billion years
building up. The verbal dam is collapsing. Head for the hills, or prepare your
intellectual craft to flow with the current.”
==========
08:12:41
The fact that we regard many of these societies as “backward” probably kept us from
learning from them.
==========
08:22:37
“Well, I think we need people like Tim and Al,” Sidney Cohen offers, genially
accepting Leary’s framing. “They’re absolutely necessary to get out, way out, too
far out in fact—in order to move the ship . . . [turn] things around.” Then,
turning to Osmond: “And we need people like you, to be reflective about it and to
study it. And little by little, a slight movement is made in the totality. So, you
know, I can’t think of how it could have worked out otherwise.”
==========
08:24:16
“Curiosity” is an accurate but tepid word for what drove me. By now, I had
interviewed at length more than a dozen people who had gone on guided psychedelic
journeys, and it was impossible to listen to their stories without wondering what
the journey would be like for one’s self.
==========
08:26:01
All that stuff down there in the psychic basement has been stowed there for a
reason, and unless you’re looking for something specific to help solve a problem,
why would anyone willingly go down those steps and switch on that light?
==========
08:26:40
But every so often, perhaps in the wee-hour throes of insomnia or under the
influence of cannabis, I have found myself tossed in a psychic storm of existential
dread so dark and violent that the keel comes off the boat, capsizing this trusty
identity. At such times, I begin seriously to entertain the possibility that
somewhere deep beneath the equable presence I present, there exists a shadow me
made up of forces roiling, anarchic, and potentially mad. Just how thin is the skin
of my sanity? There are times when I wonder. Perhaps we all do. But did I really
want to find out?
==========
08:26:53
D. Laing once said there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other
people, and their own minds. Put me down as two for three. But there are moments
when curiosity gets the better of fear. I guess for me such a moment had arrived.
==========
08:31:11
The guide had asked him to bring along an object of personal significance, so Zeff
brought his Torah. After the effects of the LSD had come on, his
==========
08:31:17
The guide had asked him to bring along an object of personal significance, so Zeff
brought his Torah.
==========
08:37:09
“Guidelines for Voyagers and Guides.”

==========
10:34:05
community tend to be more spiritual than religious in any formal sense, focused on
the common core of mysticism or “cosmic consciousness” that they believe lies
behind all the different religious traditions.
==========
10:36:06
You need a strong ego in order to let go of it and then be able to spring back to
your boundaries.”
==========
12:54:07
Thierry David (an artist thrice nominated, I would later learn, in the category of
Best Chill/Groove Album)—I
==========
12:56:42
Sunlight and color flooded my eyes, and I drank it in greedily, surveying the room
for the welcome signifiers of non-digital reality: walls, windows, plants. But all
of it appeared in a new aspect: jeweled with light. I realized I should probably
put on my glasses, which partly domesticated the scene, but only partly: objects
continued to send their sparkles of light my way.
==========
16:59:52
“Now you have had an experience of another way to react—or not react. That can be
cultivated.” Meditation, she suggested, was one way to do that.
==========
17:00:47
Though this perspective is not something a chemical can sustain for more than a few
hours, those hours can give us an opportunity to see how it might go. And perhaps
to practice being there.
==========
17:05:12
Among some of these tribes, these snuffs are known as the “semen of the sun.”
==========
17:06:53
I asked her the question that gnawed at me whenever someone recounted such a
mystical experience: “How can you be sure this was a genuine spiritual event and
not just a drug experience?” “It’s an irrelevant question,” she replied coolly.
“This was something being revealed to me.”
==========
17:09:12
A hallucination implies a reality and a point of reference and an entity to have

it. None of those things remained.
==========
17:15:00
I could bring back and put to good use in my life. Mine, I decided, had to do with
this question of being and what I took to be its opposite term, “doing.” I
meditated on this duality, which came to seem momentous, and concluded that I was
too much occupied with the latter term in my life and not enough with the former.
True, one had to favor doing in order to get anything done, but wasn’t there also a
great virtue and psychic benefit in simply being? In contemplation rather than
action? I decided I needed to practice being with stillness, being with other
people as I find them (imperfect), and being with my own unimproved self. To savor
whatever is at this very moment, without trying to change it or even describe it.
(Huxley struggled with the same aspiration during his mescaline journey: “If one
always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else.”)
==========
17:16:39
“I hope whatever you’re doing, / you’re stopping now and then / and / not doing it
at all.”)
==========
17:24:32
What had changed for me was that now I understood exactly what these writers were
talking about: their own mystical experiences, however achieved, however
interpreted. Formerly inert, their words now emitted a new ray of relation, or at
least I was now in a position to receive it. Such emissions had always been present
in our world, flowing through literature and religion, but like electromagnetic
waves they couldn’t be understood without some kind of receiver. I had become such
a one.
==========
17:25:24
But had I earned the right to go through that door, enter into that conversation? I
don’t know about Emerson’s mystical experience (or Whitman’s or Tennyson’s), but
mine owed to a chemical. Wasn’t that cheating? Perhaps not: it seems likely that
all mental experiences are mediated by chemicals in the brain, even the most
seemingly “transcendent.” How much should the genealogy of these chemicals matter?
It turns out the very same molecules flow through the natural world and the human
brain, linking us all together in a vast watershed of tryptamines. Are these
exogenous molecules any less miraculous? (When they come from a mushroom or a plant
or a toad!) It’s worth remembering that there are many cultures where the fact that
the inspiration for visionary experiences comes from nature, is the gift of other
creatures, renders them more meaningful, not less.
==========
00:21:25
“Freud said dreams were the royal road to the unconscious,” he reminded me.
“Psychedelics could turn out to be the superhighway.”
==========
00:22:43
Feilding has had a long-standing interest in altered states of consciousness and,

specifically, the role of blood flow to the brain, which in Homo sapiens, she
believes, has been compromised ever since our species began standing upright.
==========
00:23:26
(She documented the procedure in a short but horrifying film called Heartbeat in
the Brain.)
==========
00:41:01
Robin has described the DMN variously as the brain’s “orchestra conductor,”
“corporate executive,” or “capital city,” charged with managing and “holding the
whole system together.” And with keeping the brain’s unrulier tendencies in check.
==========
00:42:05
If a researcher gives you a list of adjectives and asks you to consider how they
apply to you, it is your default mode network that leaps into action. (It also
lights up when we receive “likes” on our social media feeds.) Nodes in the default
network are thought to be responsible for autobiographical memory, the material
from which we compose the story of who we are, by linking our past experiences with
what happens to us and with projections of our future goals.
==========
00:43:17
The more precipitous the drop-off in blood flow and oxygen consumption in the
default network, the more likely a volunteer was to report the loss of a sense of
self.
==========
00:43:40
Judson Brewer, a researcher at Yale* who was using fMRI to study the brains of
experienced meditators, noticed that his scans and Robin’s looked remarkably alike.
==========
00:43:51
as a quieting of the default mode network. It appears that when activity in the
default mode network falls off precipitously, the ego temporarily vanishes, and the
usual boundaries we experience between self and world, subject and object, all melt
away.
==========
00:44:15
This sense of merging into some larger totality is of course one of the hallmarks
of the mystical experience; our sense of individuality and separateness hinges on a
bounded self and a clear demarcation between subject and object.
==========
00:44:19
bounded self and a clear demarcation between subject and object.
==========
00:44:21
bounded self and a clear demarcation between subject and object. But all that may
be a mental construction, a kind of illusion—just as the Buddhists have been trying
to tell us.
==========
00:45:02
breathing exercises (like holotropic breathwork), sensory deprivation, fasting,

prayer, overwhelming experiences of awe, extreme sports, near-death experiences,
and so on.
==========
18:36:25
not for the brain’s filtering mechanisms, the torrent of information the senses
make available to our brains at any given moment might prove difficult to process—
as indeed is sometimes the case during the psychedelic experience.
==========
18:36:39
“The question,” as David Nutt puts it, “is why the brain is ordinarily so
constrained rather than so open?” The answer may be as simple as “efficiency.”
Today most neuroscientists work under a paradigm of the brain as a prediction-
making machine. To form a perception of something out in the world, the brain takes
in as little sensory information as it needs to make an educated guess. We are
forever cutting to the chase, basically, and leaping to conclusions, relying on
prior experience to inform current perception.
==========
18:37:19
The philosophical implications of “predictive coding” are deep and strange. The
model suggests that our perceptions of the world offer us not a literal
transcription of reality but rather a seamless illusion woven from both the data of
our senses and the models in our memories.
==========
18:37:29
Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a

window on reality than the product of our imaginations—a kind of controlled
hallucination.
==========
18:38:16
But in the case of normal waking consciousness, the handshake between the data of
our senses and our preconceptions is especially firm. That’s because it is subject
to a continual process of reality testing, as when you reach out to confirm the
existence of the object in your visual field or, upon waking from a nightmare,
consult your memory to see if you really did show up to teach a class without any
clothes on.
==========
18:38:34
As a psychonaut acquaintance put it to me, “If it were possible to temporarily

experience another person’s mental state, my guess is that it would feel more like
a psychedelic state than a ‘normal’ state, because of its massive disparity with
whatever mental state is habitual with you.”
==========
18:38:52
Our senses have evolved for a much narrower purpose and take in only what serves
our needs as animals of a particular kind.
==========
18:39:34
Then there is the world according to an octopus! Imagine how differently reality
presents itself to a brain that has been so radically decentralized, its
intelligence distributed across eight arms so that each of them can taste, touch,
and even make its own “decisions” without consulting headquarters.
==========
18:41:48
when confidence in our usual top-down concepts of reality collapses, opening the
way for more bottom-up information to get through the filter. But when all that
sensory information threatens to overwhelm us, the mind furiously generates new
concepts (crazy or brilliant, it hardly matters) to make sense of it all—“and so
you might see faces coming out of the rain. “That’s the brain doing what the brain
does”—that is, working to reduce uncertainty by, in effect, telling itself stories.
==========
18:44:24
Magical thinking is one way for human minds to reduce their uncertainty about the
world, but it is less than optimal for the success of the species.
==========
18:47:49
“the ability of psychedelics to disrupt stereotyped patterns of thought and

behavior by disintegrating the patterns of [neural] activity upon which they rest.”
==========
18:54:31
memory transformed my visual perception of Mary into María Sabina, or the image of
my face in the mirror into a vision of my grandfather. The forming of still other
kinds of novel connections could manifest in mental experience as a new idea, a
fresh perspective, a creative insight, or the ascribing of new meanings to familiar
things—or any number of the bizarre mental phenomena people on psychedelics report.
The increase in entropy allows a thousand mental states to bloom, many of them
bizarre and senseless, but some number of them revelatory, imaginative, and, at
least potentially, transformative. One way to think about this blooming of mental
states is that it temporarily boosts the sheer amount of diversity in our mental
life. If problem solving is anything like evolutionary adaptation, the more
possibilities the mind has at its disposal, the more creative its solutions will
be. In this sense, entropy in the brain is a bit like variation in evolution: it
supplies the diversity of raw materials on which selection can then operate to
solve problems and bring novelty into the world. If,
==========
18:54:45
If, as so many artists and scientists have testified, the psychedelic experience is
an aid to creativity—to thinking “outside the box”—this model might help explain
why that is the case. Maybe the problem with “the box” is that it is singular.
==========
18:56:34
But maybe that’s the wrong way to think about it. Robin Carhart-Harris’s paper got
me wondering if, at least for the mind, aging is really a process of declining
entropy, the fading over time of what we should regard as a positive attribute of
mental
==========
18:56:39
But maybe that’s the wrong way to think about it. Robin Carhart-Harris’s paper got
me wondering if, at least for the mind, aging is really a process of declining
entropy, the fading over time of what we should regard as a positive attribute of
mental life.
==========
18:57:02
Certainly by middle age, the sway of habitual thinking over the operations of the
mind is nearly absolute. By now, I can count on past experience to propose quick
and usually serviceable answers to just about any question reality poses, whether
it’s about how to soothe a child or mollify a spouse, repair a sentence, accept a
compliment, answer the next question, or make sense of whatever’s happening in the
world. With experience and time, it gets easier to cut to the chase and leap to
conclusions—clichés that imply a kind of agility but that in fact may signify
precisely the opposite: a petrifaction of thought.
==========
18:57:44
Getting older might render the world more predictable (in every sense), yet it also
lightens the burden of responsibility, creating a new space for experiment.
==========
19:03:17
The first mode gives adults the ability to narrowly focus attention on a goal. (In
his own remarks, Carhart-Harris called this “ego consciousness” or “consciousness
with a point.”) In the second mode—lantern consciousness—attention is more widely
diffused, allowing the child to take in information from virtually anywhere in her
field of awareness, which is quite wide, wider than that of most adults. (By this
measure, children are more conscious than adults, rather than less.)
==========
19:03:37
To borrow Judson Brewer’s terms, lantern consciousness is expansive, spotlight

consciousness narrow, or contracted.
==========
19:03:58
Instead, the child approaches reality with the astonishment of an adult on

psychedelics.
==========
19:04:32
AI designers speak in terms of “high temperature” and “low temperature” searches

for the answers to questions. A low-temperature search (so-called because it
requires less energy) involves reaching for the most probable or nearest-to-hand
answer, like the one that worked for a similar problem in the past. Low-temperature
searches succeed more often than not. A high-temperature search requires more
energy because it involves reaching for less likely but possibly more ingenious and
creative answers—those found outside the box of preconception.
==========
19:04:39
Drawing on its wealth of experience, the adult mind performs low-temperature

searches most of the time.
==========
19:04:51
in their quest to make sense of things, their minds explore not just the nearby and
most likely but “the entire space of possibilities.”
==========
19:04:58
These high-temperature searches might be inefficient, incurring a higher rate of

error and requiring more time and mental energy to perform.
==========
19:05:08
High-temperature searches can yield answers that are more magical than realistic.
Yet there are times when hot searches are the only way to solve a problem, and
occasionally they return answers of surpassing beauty and originality. E=mc2
==========
19:06:08
“Their thinking is less constrained by experience, so they will try even the most
unlikely possibilities”; that is, they’ll conduct lots of high-temperature
searches, testing the most far-out hypotheses. “Children are better learners than
adults in many cases when the solutions are nonobvious” or, as she puts it,
“further out in the space of possibilities,” a realm where they are more at home
than we are. Far out, indeed.
==========
19:07:01
Childhood is the species’ ways of injecting noise into the system of cultural
evolution.” “Noise,” of course, is in this context another word for “entropy.”
==========
19:07:10
“The child’s brain is extremely plastic, good for learning, not accomplishing”—
better for “exploring rather than exploiting.” It also has a great many more neural
connections than the adult brain.
==========
17:17:00
(usually psilocybin rather than LSD, because, as Ross explained, it “carries none
of the political baggage of those three letters”)
==========
17:23:35
“People don’t realize how few tools we have in psychiatry to address existential
distress.” Existential distress is what psychologists call the complex of
depression, anxiety, and fear common in people confronting a terminal diagnosis.
“Xanax isn’t the answer.” If there is an answer, Bossis believes, it is going to be
more spiritual in nature than pharmacological. “So how do we not explore this,” he
asks, “if it can recalibrate how we die?”
==========
17:25:25
music—Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Pat Metheny, and Ravi Shankar,

==========
17:32:43
“Never had an orgasm of the soul

==========
17:32:52
“Never had an orgasm of the soul before.”

==========
10:47:55
the drug.) A few key themes emerged. All of the patients interviewed described
powerful feelings of connection to loved ones (“relational embeddedness” is the
term the authors used) and, more generally, a shift “from feelings of separateness
to interconnectedness.”
==========
10:50:12
At first, the falling away of the self feels threatening, but if one can let go and
surrender, powerful and usually positive emotions flow in—along with formerly
inaccessible memories and sense impressions and meanings.
==========
10:51:31
songs.These medicines may help us construct meaning, if not discover it.

==========
10:52:13
Replace the science-y word “molecule” with “sacred mushroom” or “plant teacher,”
and you have the incantations of a shaman at the start of a ceremonial healing.
==========
11:43:32
Patrick was gone by the time she got back to the hospital. “He had died seconds
before. It was like something had evaporated from him. I sat with him for three
hours. It’s a long time before the soul is out of the room.”
==========
11:44:28
The sight of that “pale blue dot” hanging in the infinite black void of space
erased the national borders on our maps and rendered Earth small, vulnerable,
exceptional, and precious.
==========
11:52:35
Matt Johnson refers to these realizations as “duh moments” and says they are common
among his volunteers and not at all insignificant. Smokers know perfectly well that
their habit is unhealthy, disgusting, expensive, and unnecessary, but under the
influence of psilocybin that knowing acquires a new weight, becomes “something they
feel in the gut and the heart. Insights like this become more compelling, stickier,
and harder to avoid thinking about. These sessions deprive people of the luxury of
mindlessness”—our default state, and one in which addictions like smoking can
flourish.
==========
11:53:32
This is why it is important to understand that “psychedelic therapy” is not simply

treatment with a psychedelic drug but rather a form of “psychedelic-assisted
therapy,” as many of the researchers take pains to emphasize.
==========
11:54:01
“You don’t get that on any other drug,” Roland Griffiths points out. Indeed, after
most drug experiences, we’re fully aware of, and often embarrassed by, the
inauthenticity of what we thought and felt while under the influence.
==========
11:57:58
By temporarily overturning that tyranny and throwing our minds into an unusually
plastic state (Robin Carhart-Harris would call it a state of heightened entropy),
psychedelics, with the help of a good therapist, give us an opportunity to propose
some new, more constructive stories about the self and its relationship to the
world, stories that just might stick.
==========
15:07:57
The rat park experiments lend support to the idea that the propensity to addiction
might have less to do with genes or chemistry than with one’s personal history and
environment. Now comes a class of chemicals
==========
15:08:06
The rat park experiments lend support to the idea that the propensity to addiction
might have less to do with genes or chemistry than with one’s personal history and
environment.
==========
15:08:22
“Do you see the world as a prison or a playground?”

==========
15:09:40
“Keltner believes that awe is a fundamental human emotion, one that evolved in us
because it promotes altruistic behavior.
==========
15:09:51
We are descendants of those who found the experience of awe blissful, because it’s
advantageous for the species to have an emotion that makes us feel part of
something much larger than ourselves.”
==========
15:10:22
Keltner’s lab at Berkeley has done a clever series of experiments demonstrating

that after people have had even a relatively modest experience of awe, such as
looking at soaring trees, they’re more likely to come to the assistance of others.
==========
15:11:20
That’s where the motivation to change often comes from—a renewed sense of
connection and responsibility, as well as the positive feeling of being a small
self in the presence of something greater.” The concept of awe, I realized, could
help
==========
15:11:22
self in the presence of something greater.” The concept of awe, I realized, could
help
==========
15:11:29
self in the presence of something greater.”
==========
15:15:23
I was reminded of Carhart-Harris’s hypothesis that depression might be the result

of an overactive default mode network—the site in the brain where rumination
appears to take place.
==========
15:16:45
“I was everybody, unity, one life with 6 billion faces. I was the one asking for
love and giving love, I was swimming in the sea, and the sea was me.”
==========
18:46:38
For me, trying to resist emotions just amplified them.

==========
18:50:06
Because their number is so small, these volunteers benefit from the care and
attention of exceptionally well-trained and dedicated therapists, who are also
biased in favor of success. Also, the placebo effect is usually strongest in a new
medicine and tends to fade over time, as observed in the case of antidepressants;
they don’t work nearly as well today as they did upon their introduction in the
1980s.
==========
18:51:27
“The DSM categories we have don’t reflect reality,” Insel said; they exist for the
convenience of the insurance industry as much as anything else. “There’s much more
of a continuum between these disorders than the DSM recognizes.”
==========
19:04:07
“Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow, and thoughts as sleds gliding down
that hill. As one sled after another goes down the hill, a small number of main
trails will appear in the snow. And every time a new sled goes down, it will be
drawn into the preexisting trails, almost like a magnet.” Those main trails
represent the most well-traveled neural connections in your brain, many of them
passing through the default mode network. “In time, it becomes more and more
difficult to glide down the hill on any other path or in a different direction.
“Think of psychedelics as temporarily flattening the snow. The deeply worn trails
disappear, and suddenly the sled can go in other directions, exploring new
landscapes and, literally, creating new pathways.” When the snow is freshest, the
mind is most impressionable, and the slightest nudge—whether from a song or an
intention or a therapist’s suggestion—can powerfully influence its future course.
==========
19:09:58
‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many
clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and
terrible truth,” he said. “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who
commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot
the terrible master.”
==========
19:13:25
observe in real time the activity in one of the key brain structures in the default
mode network: the posterior cingulate cortex.
==========
00:09:09
Big Pharma mostly invests in drugs for chronic conditions, the pills you have to
take every day. Why would it invest in a pill patients might only need to take once
in a lifetime?
==========
Dreams From My Father (Barack Obama)
08:10:58
I had been warned, before taking office, that state politics lacks the glamour of
its Washington counterpart; one labors largely in obscurity, mostly on topics that
mean a great deal to some but that the average man or woman on the street can
safely ignore (the regulation of mobile homes, say, or the tax consequences of farm
equipment depreciation). Nonetheless, I found the work satisfying, mostly because
the scale of state politics allows for concrete results-an expansion of health
insurance for poor children, or a reform of laws that send innocent men to death
row-within a meaningful time frame.
==========
08:13:40
I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a
keener appreciation for brevity.
==========
08:18:13
She had spent the previous ten years doing what she loved. She traveled the world,
working in the distant villages of Asia and Africa, helping women buy a sewing
machine or a milk cow or an education that might give them a foothold in the
world’s economy. She gathered friends from high and low, took long walks, stared at
the moon, and foraged through the local markets of Delhi or Marrakesh for some
trifle, a scarf or stone carving that would make her laugh or please the eye. She
wrote reports, read novels, pestered her children, and dreamed of grandchildren.
==========
08:19:52
restoration of public life through grassroots organizing, musings on affirmative

action and Afrocentrism-the
==========
08:19:59
restoration of public life through grassroots organizing,

==========
08:20:40
When I actually sat down and began to write, though, I found my mind pulled toward
rockier shores. First longings leapt up to brush my heart. Distant voices appeared,
and ebbed, and then appeared again. I remembered the stories that my mother and
==========
08:20:46
When I actually sat down and began to write, though, I found my mind pulled toward
rockier shores. First longings leapt up to brush my heart. Distant voices appeared,
and ebbed, and then appeared again.
==========
08:26:15
I can embrace my black brothers and sisters, whether in this country or in Africa,
and affirm a common destiny without pretending to speak to, or for, all our various
struggles-is part of what this book’s about. Finally, there are the dangers
==========
08:26:24
I can embrace my black brothers and sisters, whether in this country or in Africa,
and affirm a common destiny without pretending to speak to, or for, all our various
struggles-is part of what this book’s about.
==========
08:26:42
Such hazards are only magnified when the writer lacks the wisdom of age; the
distance that can cure one of certain vanities.
==========
10:17:33
“Now there’s something you can learn from your dad,” he would tell me. “Confidence.
The secret to a man’s success.”
==========
10:22:56
Miscegenation. The word is humpbacked, ugly, portending a monstrous outcome: like

antebellum or octoroon, it evokes images of another era, a distant world of
horsewhips and flames, dead magnolias and crumbling porticos.
==========
19:07:25
Third, the spread of the franchise described in the previous chapter led to
expansion of the political power of the working classes. This happened through the
struggles to legalize and expand trade unions, and in the rise of political parties
associated with them like the British Labour Party and the German Social Democratic
Party.
==========
19:08:03
They now owned property and had better educations, and were therefore more likely
to vote for political parties that could protect their privileges rather than ones
pushing to overturn the status quo.
==========
19:10:12
The displacement of class politics by identity politics has been very confusing to
older Marxists, who for many years clung to the old industrial working class as
their preferred category of the underprivileged. They tried to explain this shift
in terms of what Ernest Gellner labeled the “Wrong Address Theory”: “Just as
extreme Shi’ite Muslims hold that Archangel Gabriel made a mistake, delivering the
Message to Mohamed when it was intended for Ali, so Marxists basically like to
think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The
awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was
delivered to nations.”
==========
19:13:06
societies with extremes of wealth and poverty are susceptible to oligarchic

domination or to populist revolution.
==========
19:13:45
The emergence of middle-class societies also increased the legitimacy of liberal

democracy as a political system.
==========
19:14:14
There is a difference in the way that economists and sociologists think about it.
The former tend to define middle class in income terms.
==========
19:14:34
This makes the definition of middle class dependent on a society’s average wealth
and thus incomparable cross-nationally;
==========
19:15:03
To avoid this problem, some economists choose an absolute level of consumption,

ranging from a low of US$5 a day, or $1,800 in parity purchasing power per year, up
to a range of $6,000–$31,000 annual income in 2010 U.S. dollars. This fixes one
problem but creates another, since an individual’s perception of class status is
often relative rather than absolute. As Adam Smith noted in The Wealth of Nations,
a pauper in eighteenth-century England might have lived like a king in Africa.
==========
19:15:19
Sociologists, in a tradition beginning with Karl Marx, tend not to look at measures
of income but instead at how one’s income is earned—occupational status, level of
education, and assets.
==========
19:16:03
A poor person of low social status and education who briefly rises out of poverty
and then sinks back is likely to be more preoccupied with day-to-day survival than
with political activism.
==========
19:16:42
A strong middle class with some assets and education is more likely to believe in
the need for both property rights and democratic accountability. One wants to
protect the value of one’s property
==========
19:16:51
A strong middle class with some assets and education is more likely to believe in
the need for both property rights and democratic accountability.
==========
19:17:40
Ronald Inglehart, who has overseen the massive World Values Survey that seeks to
measure value change around the world, has argued that economic modernization and
middle-class status produce what he calls “post-material” values in which
democracy, equality, and identity issues become much more prominent than older
issues of economic distribution.
==========
19:17:53
Economically, the middle class is theorized to have “bourgeois” values of self-

discipline, hard work, and a longer-term perspective that encourages savings and
investment.3
==========
21:18:38
Many believe that the current Chinese government is already providing them with
these things and do not oppose the system as a whole.
==========
21:19:17
size of the middle class relative to the rest of the society is one important
variable in determining how it will behave politically. When the middle class
constitutes only 20–30 percent of the population, it may side with antidemocratic
forces because it fears the intentions of the large mass of poor people below it
and the populist policies they may pursue.
==========
21:20:43
Spain, the country that kicked off the Third Wave, had been transformed from a
backward agrarian society at the time of the civil war in the 1930s to a much more
modern one by the early 1970s. Surrounded by examples of successful democracies in
the European Union, it was much easier to contemplate a democratic transition then
than it had been a generation earlier.
==========
21:30:26
Karl Marx’s Communist utopia did not materialize in the developed world because his
global proletariat turned into a global middle class.
==========
21:31:27
In addition, politicians across the world saw cheap, subsidized credit as an

acceptable substitute for outright income redistribution, leading to government-
backed housing booms.
==========
21:31:51
globalization—the fact that lower transportation and communications costs have

effectively added hundreds of millions of low-skill workers to the global labor
market, driving down wages for comparable skills in developed countries. With
rising labor costs
==========
21:31:58
globalization—the fact that lower transportation and communications costs have

effectively added hundreds of millions of low-skill workers to the global labor
market, driving down wages for comparable skills in developed countries.
==========
How Democracies Die (Steven Levitsky;Daniel Ziblatt)
00:43:26
Our Constitution, our national creed of freedom and equality, our historically
robust middle class, our high levels of wealth and education, and our large,
diversified private sector—all these should inoculate us from the kind of
democratic breakdown that has occurred elsewhere.
==========
00:49:49
Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents
or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power.
==========
00:52:25
nearly two decades after Chávez first won the presidency, that Venezuela was widely
recognized as an autocracy.
==========
00:52:51
Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different
means.
==========
00:54:02
Many government efforts to subvert democracy are “legal,” in the sense that they
are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be
portrayed as efforts to improve democracy—making the judiciary more efficient,
combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.
==========
00:54:12
Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship.
==========
00:55:06
In 2011, when a Latinobarómetro survey asked Venezuelans to rate their own country
from 1 (“not at all democratic”) to 10 (“completely democratic”), 51 percent of
respondents gave their country a score of 8 or higher. Because there is no single
moment—no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution—in
which the regime obviously “crosses the line” into dictatorship, nothing may set
off society’s alarm bells.
==========
10:48:23
Answering such a question requires stepping back from daily headlines and breaking
news alerts to widen our view, drawing lessons from the experiences of other
democracies around the world and throughout history.
==========
10:49:00
A comparative approach also reveals how elected autocrats in different parts of the
world employ remarkably similar strategies to subvert democratic institutions.
==========
10:50:05
Isolating popular extremists requires political courage.

==========
10:51:18
Donald Trump’s surprise victory was made possible not only by public disaffection
but also by the Republican Party’s failure to keep an extremist demagogue within
its own ranks from gaining the nomination.
==========
10:51:52
Democracies work best—and survive longer—where constitutions are reinforced by

unwritten democratic norms.
==========
10:52:13
mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one another
as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, or the idea that politicians should exercise
restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives.
==========
10:53:17
The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—

one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race
and culture.
==========
10:53:38
America’s efforts to achieve racial equality as our society grows increasingly

diverse have fueled an insidious reaction and intensifying polarization. And if one
thing is clear from studying breakdowns throughout history, it’s that extreme
polarization can kill democracies.
==========
10:54:20
Many Americans are justifiably frightened by what is happening to our country. But
protecting our democracy requires more than just fright or outrage. We must be
humble and bold.
==========
11:02:58
Convinced that “something must finally give,” a cabal of rivalrous conservatives

convened in late January 1933 and settled on a solution: A popular outsider should
be placed at the head of the government. They despised him but knew that at least
he had a mass following. And, most of all, they thought they could control him.
==========
11:03:04
“We’ve engaged him for ourselves….Within two months, we will have pushed [him] so
far into a corner that he’ll squeal.” A more profound miscalculation is hard to
imagine.
==========
11:03:55
an insider breaks ranks to embrace the insurgent before his rivals do, he can use
the outsider’s energy and base to outmaneuver his peers. And then, establishment
politicians hope, the insurgent can be redirected to support their own program.
==========
11:04:08
This sort of devil’s bargain often mutates to the benefit of the insurgent, as
alliances provide outsiders with enough respectability to become legitimate
contenders for power.
==========
11:05:51
Venezuelan politics was long dominated by two parties, the center-left Democratic
Action and Caldera’s center-right Social Christian Party (known as COPEI). The two
alternated in power peacefully for more than thirty years, and by the 1970s,
Venezuela was viewed as a model democracy in a region plagued by coups and
dictatorships.
==========
11:08:17
Caldera’s public flirtation with Chávez did more than boost his own standing in the
polls; it also gave Chávez new credibility. Chávez and his comrades had sought to
destroy their country’s thirty-four-year-old democracy. But rather than denouncing
the coup leaders as an extremist threat, the former president offered them public
sympathy—and, with it, an opening to mainstream politics.
==========
11:08:56
But back in 1993, Chávez still had a major problem. He was in jail, awaiting trial
for treason. However, in 1994, now-President Caldera dropped all charges against
him.
==========
11:10:14
Despite their vast differences, Hitler, Mussolini, and Chávez followed routes to
power that share striking similarities. Not only were they all outsiders with a
flair for capturing public attention, but each of them rose to power because
establishment politicians overlooked the warning signs and either handed over power
to them (Hitler and Mussolini) or opened the door for them (Chávez).
==========
11:10:24
The abdication of political responsibility by existing leaders often marks a

nation’s first step toward authoritarianism.
==========
11:10:51
demagogue
==========
11:15:46
When faced with the rise of extremists or demagogues, they make a concerted effort
to isolate and defeat them. Although mass responses to extremist appeals matter,
what matters more is whether political elites, and especially parties, serve as
filters. Put simply, political parties are democracy’s gatekeepers.
==========
11:15:51
If authoritarians are to be kept out, they first have to be identified. There

==========
11:15:59
If authoritarians are to be kept out, they first have to be identified.

==========
11:19:36
We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic

rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or
encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties
of opponents, including the media.
==========
11:20:00
Populists are antiestablishment politicians—figures who, claiming to represent the

voice of “the people,” wage war on what
==========
11:20:07
Populists are antiestablishment politicians—figures who, claiming to represent the

voice of “the people,” wage war on what they depict as a corrupt and conspiratorial
elite.
==========
11:20:13
Populists tend to deny the legitimacy of established parties, attacking them as

undemocratic and even unpatriotic.
==========
11:20:20
They tell voters that the existing system is not really a democracy but instead has
been hijacked, corrupted, or rigged by the elite.
==========
11:20:27
And they promise to bury that elite and return power to “the people.”
==========
11:21:37
Do they claim that their rivals constitute an existential threat, either to

national security or to the prevailing way of life?
==========
11:23:29
Nancy Bermeo calls “distancing.” Prodemocratic parties may engage in distancing in

several ways. First, they can keep would-be authoritarians off party ballots at
election time. This requires that they resist the temptation to nominate these
extremists for higher office even when they can potentially deliver votes.
==========
11:24:41
Fourth, prodemocratic parties can act to systematically isolate, rather than

legitimize, extremists.
==========
11:25:33
courageous party leadership means putting democracy and country before party and
articulating to voters what is at stake.
==========
11:30:53
Although the Socialists distrusted van Zeeland, a Catholic Party man, they
nevertheless put democracy ahead of their own interests and endorsed the grand
coalition.
==========
11:35:51
As Schmuckenschlager explained it, power politics sometimes has to be put aside to

do the right thing.
==========
11:36:22
In addition, the strong urban/rural division that has always marked Austrian
politics (between left-wing urban areas and right-wing rural areas) was
dramatically diminished in the second round in December 2016, with a surprising
number of traditional rural conservative states switching to vote for Van der
Bellen.
==========
11:36:58
Still, their effort to keep an extremist out of the presidency provides a useful
model of contemporary gatekeeping.
==========
11:38:41
In this world turned upside down, Lindbergh beats Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the
incumbent, to become president.
==========
11:39:04
And Lindbergh, whose campaign is later revealed to be linked to Hitler, goes on to

sign peace treaties with America’s enemies. A wave of anti-Semitism and violence is
unleashed across America.
==========
11:42:49
Wallace engaged in what journalist Arthur Hadley called the “old and honorable
American tradition of hate the powerful.”
==========
11:42:56
He was, Hadley wrote, a master at exploiting “plain old American rage.”

==========
11:43:24
There is one thing more powerful than the Constitution….That’s the will of the
people. What is a Constitution anyway? They’re the products of the people, the
people are the first source of power, and the people can abolish a Constitution if
they want
==========
11:43:30
There is one thing more powerful than the Constitution….That’s the will of the
people. What is a Constitution anyway? They’re the products of the people, the
people are the first source of power, and the people can abolish a Constitution
==========
11:47:15
Nobody likes smoke-filled rooms today—and for good reason. They were not very
democratic.
==========
11:47:33
Candidates were chosen by a small group of power brokers who were not accountable
to the party rank and file, much less to average citizens. And smoke-filled rooms
did not always produce good presidents—Harding’s term, after all, was marked by
scandal. But backroom candidate selection had a virtue that is often forgotten
today: It served a gatekeeping function, keeping demonstrably unfit figures off the
ballot and out of office.
==========
11:48:29
Presidents, by contrast, are not sitting members of Congress, nor are they elected
by Congress. At least in theory, they are elected by the people, and anyone can run
for president and—if he or she earns enough support—win.
==========
11:48:51
Our founders were deeply concerned with gatekeeping. In designing the Constitution
and electoral system, they grappled with a dilemma that, in many respects, remains
with us today. On the one hand, they sought not a monarch but an elected president—
one who conformed to their idea of a republican popular government, reflecting the
will of the people.
==========
11:49:02
On the other, the founders did not fully trust the people’s ability to judge
candidates’ fitness for office.
==========
11:49:12
Alexander Hamilton worried that a popularly elected presidency could be too easily
captured by those who would play on fear and ignorance to win elections and then
rule as tyrants.
==========
11:50:15
The Electoral College, made up of locally prominent men in each state, would thus
be responsible for choosing the president. Under this arrangement, Hamilton
reasoned, “the office of president will seldom fall to the lot of any man who is
not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”
==========
11:50:28
Men with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” would be
filtered out. The Electoral College thus became our original gatekeeper.
==========
11:50:55
Though Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would go on to pioneer our two-party
system,
==========
11:51:27
Instead of electing local notables as delegates to the Electoral College, as the

founders had envisioned, each state began to elect party loyalists.
==========
13:44:07
They must, therefore, strike a balance between two roles: a democratic role, in
which they choose the candidates that best represent the party’s voters; and what
political scientist James Ceaser calls a “filtration” role, in which they screen
out those who pose a threat to democracy or are otherwise unfit to hold office.
==========
13:45:14
overreliance on gatekeeping is, in itself, undemocratic—it can create a world of

party bosses who ignore the rank and file and fail to represent the people.
==========
13:45:27
But an overreliance on the “will of the people” can also be dangerous, for it can
lead to the election of a demagogue who threatens democracy itself. There is no
escape from this tension. There are always trade-offs.
==========
13:45:35
An overreliance on gatekeeping is, in itself, undemocratic—it can create a world of
party bosses who ignore the rank and file and fail to represent the people. But an
overreliance on the “will of the people” can also be dangerous, for it can lead to
the election of a demagogue who threatens democracy itself. There is no escape from
this tension. There are always trade-offs.
==========
13:49:30
Party insiders provided what political scientists called “peer review.” Mayors,
senators, and congressional representatives knew the candidates personally.
==========
13:49:52
Smoke-filled back rooms therefore served as a screening mechanism, helping to keep

out the kind of demagogues and extremists who derailed democracy elsewhere in the
world. American party gatekeeping was so effective that outsiders simply couldn’t
win. As a result, most didn’t even try.
==========
13:51:53
Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf and described by future Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler as
“one of our most valuable, important, and witty fighters.”
==========
14:17:15
the people were not given a real say, the McGovern–Fraser

==========
14:17:23
If the people were not given a real say, the McGovern–Fraser report darkly warned,
they would turn to “the anti-politics of the street.”
==========
14:21:52
By placing presidential nominations in the hands of voters, binding primaries

weakened parties’ gatekeeping function, potentially eliminating the peer review
process and opening the door to outsiders.
==========
14:22:36
Circumventing the party establishment was, it turned out, easier in theory than in
practice. Capturing a majority of delegates required winning primaries all over the
country, which, in turn, required money, favorable media coverage, and, crucially,
people working on the ground in all states.
==========
14:59:44
Trump had switched his party registration several times and had even contributed to
Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the U.S. Senate.
==========
15:00:49
But the world had changed. Party gatekeepers were shells of what they once were,
for two main reasons. One was a dramatic increase in the availability of outside
money, accelerated (though hardly caused) by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens
United ruling.
==========
15:01:09
The other major factor diminishing the power of traditional gatekeepers was the
explosion of alternative media, particularly cable news and social media.
==========
15:01:32
This was particularly true on the Republican side, where the emergence of Fox News
and influential radio talk-show personalities—what political commentator David Frum
calls the “conservative entertainment complex”—radicalized conservative voters, to
the benefit of ideologically extreme candidates.
==========
15:02:30
Party gatekeepers failed at three key junctures: the “invisible primary,” the
primaries themselves, and the general election.
==========
15:04:19
Undoubtedly, Trump’s celebrity status played a role. But equally important was the
changed media landscape. From early on in the campaign, Trump had the sympathy or
support of right-wing media personalities such as Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Mark
Levin, and Michael Savage, as well as the increasingly influential Breitbart News.
Although Trump initially had a contentious relationship with Fox News, he reaped
the benefits of its polarized media landscape.
==========
15:04:31
qualities uniquely tailored to the digital age,” Trump attracted free mainstream
coverage by creating controversy.
==========
15:04:37
Trump attracted free mainstream coverage by creating controversy.

==========
15:04:54
Trump enjoyed up to $2 billion in free media coverage during the primary season.
==========
15:05:51
But the #NeverTrump movement was always more talk than action. In reality, the
primary system had left Republican leaders virtually weaponless to halt Trump’s
rise. The barrage of attacks had little impact and possibly even backfired where it
counted: the voting booth.
==========
19:06:41
Trump’s critics took him literally but not seriously, his supporters took him
seriously but not literally.
==========
19:08:00
According to historian Douglas Brinkley, no major presidential candidate had cast

such doubt on the democratic system since 1860.
==========
21:26:29
Trump was precisely the kind of figure that had haunted Hamilton and other founders
when they created the American presidency.
==========
21:28:25
The United States has a two-party system; only two candidates stood a chance to win
the 2016 election, and one of them was a demagogue. For Republicans, it tested
their political courage. Would they accept short-term political sacrifice for the
good of the country?
==========
21:31:06
In short, most Republican leaders ended up holding the party line. If they had
broken decisively with Trump, telling Americans loudly and clearly that he posed a
threat to our country’s cherished institutions, and if, on those grounds, they had
endorsed Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump might never have ascended to the presidency.
==========
21:52:09
look at demagogic leaders around the world suggests that many of them do eventually
cross the line from words to action.
==========
21:54:09
But for outsiders, particularly those of a demagogic bent, democratic politics is

often intolerably frustrating. For them, checks and balances feel like a
straitjacket.
==========
21:57:00
The erosion of democracy takes place piecemeal, often in baby steps.

==========
22:02:47
Most often, the capture of the referees is done by quietly firing civil servants
and other nonpartisan officials and replacing them with loyalists.
==========
08:06:13
Supreme court president Cecilia Sosa resigned, declaring that the court had
“committed suicide to avoid being assassinated.
==========
08:07:43
The easiest way to deal with potential opponents is to buy them off. Most elected
autocrats begin by offering leading political, business, or media figures public
positions, favors, perks, or outright bribes in exchange for their support or, at
least, their quiet neutrality.
==========
08:07:58
Cooperative media outlets may gain privileged access to the president, while
friendly business executives may receive profitable concessions or government
contracts.
==========
08:09:42
Players who cannot be bought must be weakened by other means. Whereas old-school
dictators often jailed, exiled, or even killed their rivals, contemporary autocrats
tend to hide their repression behind a veneer of legality.
==========
08:15:17
The message to the oligarchs was clear: Stay out of politics. Nearly all of them
did. Starved of resources, opposition parties weakened, many to the point of
extinction.
==========
08:18:00
When powerful businesspeople are jailed or ruined economically, as in the case of

Khodorkovsky in Russia, other businesspeople conclude that it is wisest to withdraw
from politics entirely.
==========
08:18:21
Many dissenters decide to stay home rather than enter politics, and those who
remain active grow demoralized. This is what the government aims for. Once key
opposition, media, and business players are bought off or sidelined, the opposition
deflates. The government “wins” without necessarily breaking the rules.
==========
08:20:15
During the era of Reconstruction, the mass enfranchisement of African Americans

posed a major threat to southern white political control and to the political
dominance of the Democratic Party.
==========
08:22:28
no mention of race could be made in efforts to restrict voting rights, so states

introduced purportedly “neutral” poll taxes, property requirements, literacy tests,
and complex written ballots. “The overarching aim of all of these restrictions,”
historian Alex Keyssar observed, “was to keep poor and illiterate blacks…from the
polls.”
==========
08:23:01
South Carolina, whose population was majority black, was a pioneer of vote
restriction. The 1882 “Eight Box Law” created a complex ballot that made it nearly
impossible for illiterates to exercise the franchise, and since most of the state’s
black residents were illiterate, black turnout plummeted.
==========
08:23:23
tax and a literacy test. Black turnout, which had reached 96 percent in 1876, fell
to just 11 percent in 1898.
==========
08:23:33
Seven years later, the state introduced a poll tax and a literacy test. Black
turnout, which had reached 96 percent in 1876, fell to just 11 percent in 1898.
==========
08:24:57
These “reform” measures effectively killed democracy in the American South.

==========
08:25:58
Because these measures are carried out piecemeal and with the appearance of
legality, the drift into authoritarianism doesn’t always set off alarm bells.
==========
08:26:18
Would-be autocrats often use economic crises, natural disasters, and especially
security threats—wars, armed insurgencies, or terrorist attacks—to justify
antidemocratic measures.
==========
08:27:13
Crises are hard to predict, but their political consequences are not.
==========
08:27:45
Because few politicians are willing to stand up to a president with 90 percent

support in the middle of a national security crisis, presidents are left virtually
unchecked.
==========
08:28:07
Citizens are also more likely to tolerate—and even support—authoritarian measures

during security crises, especially when they fear for their own safety.
==========
08:28:20
In the aftermath of 9/11, 55 percent of surveyed Americans said they believed it

was necessary to give up some civil liberties to curb terrorism, up from 29 percent
in 1997.
==========
08:32:40
For demogagues hemmed in by constitutional constraints, a crisis represents an

opportunity to begin to dismantle the inconvenient and sometimes threatening checks
and balances that come with democratic politics. Crises allow autocrats to expand
their room to maneuver and protect themselves from perceived enemies. But the
question remains: Are democratic institutions so easily swept away?
==========
08:58:23
Germany’s 1919 Weimar constitution was designed by some of the country’s greatest
legal minds. Its long-standing and highly regarded Rechtsstaat (“rule of law”) was
considered by many as sufficient to prevent government abuse. But both the
constitution and the Rechtsstaat collapsed rapidly in the face of Adolf Hitler’s
usurpation of power in 1933.
==========
08:59:50
presidents rather than notorious autocrats. Even well-designed constitutions

cannot, by themselves, guarantee democracy. For one, constitutions are always
incomplete. Like any set of rules, they have countless gaps and ambiguities. No
operating manual, no matter how detailed, can anticipate all possible contingencies
or prescribe how to behave under all possible circumstances.
==========
09:01:19
The U.S. Constitution is, by most accounts, a brilliant document. But the original
Constitution—only four pages long—can be interpreted in many different, and even
contradictory, ways.
==========
09:01:52
the constitution written in Philadelphia in 1787 is not what secured American

democracy for so long, then what did? Many factors mattered, including our nation’s
immense wealth, a large middle class, and a vibrant civil society.
==========
09:02:08
All successful democracies rely on informal rules that, though not found in the
constitution or any laws, are widely known and respected. In the case of American
democracy, this has been vital.
==========
09:36:21
Democracy, of course, is not street basketball. Democracies do have written rules

(constitutions) and referees (the courts). But these work best, and survive
longest, in countries where written constitutions are reinforced by their own
unwritten rules of the game.
==========
09:37:11
But two norms stand out as fundamental to a functioning democracy: mutual

toleration and institutional forbearance.
==========
09:38:09
Mutual toleration refers to the idea that as long as our rivals play by
constitutional rules, we accept that they have an equal right to exist, compete for
power, and govern. We may disagree with, and even strongly dislike, our rivals, but
we nevertheless accept them as legitimate. This means recognizing that our
political rivals are decent, patriotic, law-abiding citizens—that they love our
country and respect the
==========
09:38:30
Put another way, mutual toleration is politicians’ collective willingness to agree

to disagree.
==========
09:40:24
But mutual toleration is not inherent to all democracies. When Spain underwent its
first genuine democratic transition in 1931, for example, hopes were high. The new
left-leaning Republican government, led by Prime Minister Manuel Azaña, was
committed to parliamentary democracy. But the government confronted a highly
polarized society, ranging from anarchists and Marxists on the left to monarchists
and fascists on the right. Opposing sides viewed each other not as partisan rivals
but as mortal enemies. On the one hand, right-wing Catholics and monarchists, who
watched in horror as the privileges of the social institutions they valued most—the
Church, the army, and the monarchy—were dismantled, did not accept the new republic
as legitimate.
==========
09:40:36
“bolshevizing foreign agents.”

==========
09:42:00
When norms of mutual toleration are weak, democracy is hard to sustain. If we view
our rivals as a dangerous threat, we have much to fear if they are elected. We may
decide to employ any means necessary to defeat them—and therein lies a
justification for authoritarian measures. Politicians who are tagged as criminal or
subversive may be jailed; governments deemed to
==========
09:42:06
When norms of mutual toleration are weak, democracy is hard to sustain. If we view
our rivals as a dangerous threat, we have much to fear if they are elected. We may
decide to employ any means necessary to defeat them—and therein lies a
justification for authoritarian measures. Politicians who are tagged as criminal or
subversive may be jailed; governments deemed to pose a threat to the nation may be
overthrown.
==========
10:27:55
During the time when kings proclaimed divine-right rule—where religious sanction
provided the basis of monarchic authority—no mortal constraint legally limited the
power of kings.
==========
10:28:13
To be “godly,” after all, required wisdom and self-restraint. When a figure such as
King Richard II, portrayed as a tyrant in one of Shakespeare’s most famous
historical plays, abuses his royal prerogatives in order to expropriate and
plunder, his violations are not illegal; they merely violate custom. But the
violations are highly consequential, for they unleash a bloody civil war.
==========
10:29:23
This means that although individuals play to win, they must do so with a degree of
restraint. In a pickup basketball game, we play aggressively, but we know not to
foul excessively—and to call a foul only when it is egregious. After all, you show
up at the park to play a basketball game, not to fight.
==========
10:30:40
take presidential term limits. For most of American history, the two-term limit was
not a law but a norm of forbearance. Before ratification of the Twenty-Second
Amendment in 1951, nothing in the Constitution dictated that presidents step down
after two terms. But George Washington’s retirement after two terms in 1797 set a
powerful precedent. As Thomas Jefferson, the first sitting president to follow the
norm, observed, If some termination of the services of the [President] be not fixed
by the Constitution, or supplied by practice, his office, nominally for four years,
will in fact become for life….I should unwillingly be the person who, disregarding
sound precedent set by an illustrious predecessor, should furnish the first example
of prolongation beyond the second term in office. Thus established, the informal
two-term limit proved remarkably robust. Even ambitious and popular presidents such
as Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Ulysses S. Grant refrained from challenging it.
When friends of Grant encouraged him to seek a third term, it caused an uproar, and
the House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring: The precedent
==========
10:30:54
Or take presidential term limits. For most of American history, the two-term limit
was not a law but a norm of forbearance. Before ratification of the Twenty-Second
Amendment in 1951, nothing in the Constitution dictated that presidents step down
after two terms. But George Washington’s retirement after two terms in 1797 set a
powerful precedent. As Thomas Jefferson,
==========
10:31:40
The precedent established by Washington and other presidents…in retiring from…

office after their second term has become…a part of our republican system….[A]ny
departure from this time-honored custom would be unwise, unpatriotic, and fraught
with peril to our free institutions.
==========
10:38:48
Politicians are more likely to be forbearing when they accept one another as
legitimate rivals, and politicians who do not view their rivals as subversive will
be less tempted to resort to norm breaking to keep them out of power.
==========
10:39:38
When parties view one another as mortal enemies, the stakes of political
competition heighten dramatically.
==========
18:41:38
“institutional checkmate.”
==========
18:43:22
And indeed, the historical experience of democracies in Western Europe shows us

that norms can be sustained even where parties are separated by considerable
ideological differences. But when societies grow so deeply divided that parties
become wedded to incompatible worldviews, and especially when their members are so
socially segregated that they rarely interact, stable partisan rivalries eventually
give way to perceptions of mutual threat.
==========
18:43:37
As mutual toleration disappears, politicians grow tempted to abandon forbearance

and try to win at all costs. This may encourage the rise of antisystem groups that
reject democracy’s rules altogether. When that happens, democracy is in trouble.
==========
18:48:33
As we have seen, norms of mutual toleration were at best embryonic in the 1780s and
1790s:
==========
18:48:43
This climate of partisan hostility and distrust encouraged what we would today call
constitutional hardball.
==========
18:51:08
investing politics with what one historian has called a new “emotional intensity.”
==========
18:52:26
The erosion of basic norms expanded the zone of acceptable political action.
==========
18:53:44
Was the U.S. Constitution not the providentially inspired document it had been
thought to be? This wave of self-examination gave rise to a new interest in
unwritten rules.
==========
18:55:55
“fold up the bloody shirt” and shift the debate to economic issues.
==========
18:56:02
Mutual toleration was established only after the issue of racial equality was
removed from the political agenda.
==========
18:59:00
For our constitutional system to function as we expect it to, the executive branch,
Congress, and the judiciary must strike a delicate balance.
==========
18:59:53
Under divided government, where legislative or judicial institutions are in the

hands of the opposition, the risk is constitutional hardball, in which the
opposition deploys its institutional prerogatives as far as it can extend them—
defunding the government, blocking all presidential judicial appointments, and
perhaps even voting to remove the president.
==========
23:27:55
Postwar American presidents controlled the largest military force in the world.
==========
23:28:05
Postwar American presidents controlled the largest military force in the world. And
==========
23:28:18
Postwar American presidents controlled the largest military force in the world. And
the challenges of governing a global superpower and complex industrial economy and
society generated ever-growing demands for more concentrated executive action.
==========
23:30:31
Throughout his life, Washington had learned that he “gained power from his
readiness to give it up.”
==========
23:34:25
Roosevelt subscribed to what he called the stewardship theory of the presidency,

which asserted that all executive actions were allowed unless expressly prohibited
by law.
==========
23:45:49
So although the office of the American presidency strengthened during the twentieth
century, American presidents demonstrated considerable restraint in their exercise
of that power. Even in the absence of constitutional barriers, unilateral executive
action remained largely a wartime exception, rather than the rule.
==========
23:47:58
U.S. Supreme Court changed size seven times between 1800 and 1869—each time for
political reasons. By the late nineteenth century, however, court packing was
widely viewed as unacceptable.
==========
23:54:05
The spirit of reciprocity results in much, if not most, of the senators’ actual
power not being exercised.”
==========
23:54:28
Matthews’s seminal study of the U.S. Senate during the late 1950s highlights how
informal norms, or what he called “folkways,” helped the institution function. Two
of these folkways are closely associated with forbearance: courtesy and
reciprocity. Courtesy meant, first and foremost, avoiding personal or embarrassing
attacks on fellow senators.
==========
23:54:34
“political disagreements influence personal feelings.”

==========
23:54:59
call a man a liar when you know he is one.” But senators viewed courtesy as
critical to their success, since, as one senator put it, “your enemies on one issue
may be your friends on the next.” In the words of another senator, political self-
preservation “dictates at least a semblance of friendship. And then before you know
it, you really are friends.”
==========
23:55:33
“It’s not a matter of friendship; it’s just a matter of, ‘I won’t be an S.O.B. if
you won’t be one.’ ”
==========
23:55:48
these norms more clearly than the filibuster. Prior to 1917, again, any senator
could obstruct legislation by using a filibuster to delay a vote indefinitely. Yet
this rarely happened. Though available to any senator, at any time, most senators
treated the filibuster
==========
23:55:57
No institutional tool illustrates the importance of these norms more clearly than
the filibuster. Prior to 1917, again, any senator could obstruct legislation by
using a filibuster to delay a vote indefinitely. Yet this rarely happened. Though
available to any senator, at any time, most senators treated the filibuster as a
“procedural weapon of last resort.”
==========
23:57:50
Highly qualified nominees were invariably approved even when senators disagreed
with them ideologically.
==========
10:20:37
Finally, one of the most potentially explosive prerogatives granted to Congress by

the Constitution is the power to remove a sitting president via impeachment. This,
British scholar James Bryce noted more than a century ago, is “the heaviest piece
of artillery in the congressional arsenal.” But, Bryce continued, “because it is so
heavy, it is unfit for ordinary use.”
==========
10:21:48
Unlike in Paraguay or Ecuador, however, impeachment in the United States has long
been governed by norms of forbearance.
==========
10:22:04
“The House of Representatives should not aggressively carry out an impeachment

unless…there is a reasonable probability that the impeachment will result in the
target’s removal from office.” Since removal requires a two-thirds vote in the
Senate, this means that impeachment should have at least some bipartisan support.
==========
10:24:21
Anticommunist hysteria could be harnessed for partisan ends: Politicians could red-
bait, or seek votes by casting their opponents as communists or communist
sympathizers.
==========
10:24:31
Between 1946 and 1954, anticommunism found its way into partisan politics. The
advent of the Cold War had created a frenzy over national security, and the
Republican Party, which had been out of national power for nearly twenty years, was
searching desperately for a new electoral appeal.
==========
10:25:16
McCarthy ranted against communism and the presence of “traitors” within, and then
stumbled onto a line that instantly became iconic: “I have here in my hand a list
of 205 names that were made known to the Secretary of State and who nevertheless
are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” The reaction was
immediate. The press went wild. McCarthy, a demagogue who loved the attention,
began repeating the speech, realizing he had hit upon a political gold mine.
==========
10:25:49
Red-baiting became a common tactic among Republican candidates in the early 1950s.
==========
10:27:35
McCarthy’s fall discredited the practice of red-baiting, giving rise to a new

pejorative label: “McCarthyism.”
==========
10:29:49
The administration also deployed the Internal Revenue Service as a political

weapon, auditing such key opponents as National Democratic Committee Chair Larry
O’Brien. Most prominent, however, was Nixon’s campaign to sabotage his Democratic
rivals in the 1972 election, which culminated in the botched Watergate break-in.
==========
10:51:04
The guardrails held, as politicians from both parties—and often, society as a whole
—pushed back against violations that might have threatened democracy.
==========
10:51:10
partisan warfare never escalated into the kind of “death spiral” that destroyed
democracies in Europe in the 1930s and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.
==========
10:52:41
The process of racial inclusion that began after World War II and culminated in the
1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act would, at long last, fully
democratize the United States. But it would also polarize it, posing the greatest
challenge to established forms of mutual toleration and forbearance since
Reconstruction.
==========
10:55:03
The traditions underpinning America’s democratic institutions are unraveling,

opening up a disconcerting gap between how our political system works and long-
standing expectations about how it ought to work. As our soft guardrails have
weakened, we have grown increasingly vulnerable to antidemocratic leaders.
==========
10:56:42
slug-fest….What’s the primary purpose of a political leader?…To build a majority.

==========
10:58:25
GOPAC produced more than two thousand training audiotapes, distributed each month
to get the recruits of Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” on the same rhetorical
page. Gingrich’s former press secretary Tony Blankley compared this tactic of
audiotape distribution to one used by the Ayatollah Khomeini on his route to power
in Iran.
==========
11:01:37
With Gingrich now Speaker of the House, the GOP adopted a “no compromise” approach—
a signal of ideological purity to the party base—that brazenly rejected forbearance
in pursuit of victory by “any means necessary.” House Republicans refused to
compromise, for example, in budget negotiations, leading to a five-day government
shutdown in 1995 and a twenty-one-day shutdown in 1996. This was a dangerous turn.
Without forebearance, checks and balances give way to deadlock and
==========
11:01:44
With Gingrich now Speaker of the House, the GOP adopted a “no compromise” approach—
a signal of ideological purity to the party base—that brazenly rejected forbearance
in pursuit of victory by “any means necessary.” House Republicans refused to
compromise, for example, in budget negotiations, leading to a five-day government
shutdown in 1995 and a twenty-one-day shutdown in 1996. This was a dangerous turn.
Without forebearance, checks and balances give way to deadlock and dysfunction.
==========
08:16:19
Indeed, the New York Times quoted one Democratic strategist as saying that the
Senate needed to “change the ground rules…there [is] no obligation to confirm
someone just because they are scholarly or erudite.”
==========
08:18:39
Norm breaking was also evident at the state level. Among the most notorious cases
was the 2003 Texas redistricting plan. Under the Constitution, state legislatures
may modify congressional districts to maintain districts of equal population.
However, there exists a long-standing and widely shared norm that redistricting
should occur once a decade, immediately after publication of the census. This is
with good reason: Because people move continuously, redistricting that occurs later
in a decade will be based on less accurate population figures. Though there is no
legal impediment to
==========
08:18:46
Norm breaking was also evident at the state level. Among the most notorious cases
was the 2003 Texas redistricting plan. Under the Constitution, state legislatures
may modify congressional districts to maintain districts of equal population.
However, there exists a long-standing and widely shared norm that redistricting
should occur once a decade, immediately after publication of the census. This is
with good reason: Because people move continuously, redistricting that occurs later
in a decade will be based on less accurate population figures. Though there is no
legal impediment to mid-decade redistricting, it has always been rare.
==========
08:26:04
The Tea Party questioned President Obama’s very right to be president.

==========
08:26:28
“Mr. President, you don’t believe in the Constitution. You believe in socialism.”
==========
08:27:24
Socialist Communist
==========
08:28:57
2004 Senate campaign and resurfaced in 2008. Republican

==========
08:29:09
Republican politicians discovered that questioning President Obama’s citizenship

was an easy way to elicit crowd enthusiasm at public appearances.
==========
08:30:22
Trump became America’s most prominent birther, appearing repeatedly on television

news programs to call on the president to release his birth certificate. And when
Obama’s certificate was made public in 2011, Trump suggested it was a forgery.
Although Trump opted not to run against Obama in 2012, his high-profile questioning
of President Obama’s nationality gained him media attention and endeared him to the
Republicans’ Tea Party base. Intolerance was politically useful.
==========
08:30:45
But the challenges to Obama’s legitimacy were different in two important ways.
First, they were not confined to the fringes, but rather accepted widely by
Republican voters. According to a 2011 Fox News poll, 37 percent of Republicans
believed that President Obama was not born in the United States, and 63 percent
said they had some doubts about his origins.
==========
08:32:05
Works and Americans for Prosperity and political action

==========
08:32:22
Tea Party Express and Tea Party Patriots sponsored dozens of Republican candidates.
In 2010, more than one hundred Tea Party–backed candidates ran for Congress, and
more than forty were elected. By 2011, the House Tea Party Caucus had sixty
members, and in 2012, Tea Party–friendly candidates emerged as contenders
==========
08:32:30
Tea Party Express and Tea Party Patriots sponsored dozens of Republican candidates.
In 2010, more than one hundred Tea Party–backed candidates ran for Congress, and
more than forty were elected. By 2011, the House Tea Party Caucus had sixty
members, and in 2012, Tea Party–friendly candidates emerged as contenders for the
Republican presidential nomination. In 2016, the Republican presidential nomination
went to a birther, at a national party convention in which Republican leaders
called their Democratic rival a criminal and led chants of “Lock her up.”
==========
08:32:56
many Republicans embraced the view that their Democratic rivals were anti-American
or posed a threat to the American way of life.
==========
08:34:22
Senate obstructionism spiked after 2008. Senate “holds,” traditionally used to

delay a
==========
08:34:36
Senate obstructionism spiked after 2008. Senate “holds,” traditionally used to

delay a floor debate for up to a week to allow senators extra time to prepare,
became “indefinite or permanent vetoes.” A stunning 385 filibusters were initiated
between 2007 and 2012—equal to the total number of filibusters in the seven decades
between World War I and the end of the Reagan administration.
==========
08:34:48
Senate Republicans continued using the judicial confirmation process as a partisan

tool: The confirmation rate of presidential circuit court appointments, which had
been over 90 percent in the 1980s, fell to barely 50 percent under President Obama.
==========
08:35:31
President Obama defended it, claiming that the filibuster had been transformed into
a “reckless and relentless tool” of obstruction and adding that “today’s pattern of
obstruction…just isn’t normal; it’s not what our founders envisioned.”
==========
08:35:59
“We can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job,” he told
an audience in Nevada. “Whenever they won’t act, I will.” Obama began to use
executive authority in a way he might not have expected to before coming into
office.
==========
08:37:05
The president’s actions were not out of constitutional bounds, but by acting
unilaterally to achieve goals that had been blocked by Congress, President Obama
violated the norm of forbearance.
==========
08:40:42
the run-up to the 2016 election, when it was widely believed that Hillary Clinton
would win, several Republican senators, including Ted Cruz, John McCain, and
Richard Burr, vowed to block all of Clinton’s Supreme Court nominations for the
next four years, effectively reducing the Court’s size to eight.
==========
08:41:02
Although the Constitution does not specify the size of the Supreme Court, the nine-
member Court had long ago become an established tradition.
==========
08:42:06
If, twenty-five years ago, someone had described to you a country in which
candidates threatened to lock up their rivals, political opponents accused the
government of stealing the election or establishing a dictatorship, and parties
used their legislative majorities to impeach presidents and steal supreme court
seats, you might have thought of Ecuador or Romania.
==========
08:42:16
If, twenty-five years ago, someone had described to you a country in which
candidates threatened to lock up their rivals, political opponents accused the
government of stealing the election or establishing a dictatorship, and parties
used their legislative majorities to impeach presidents and steal supreme court
seats, you might have thought of Ecuador or Romania. You probably would not have
thought of the United States.
==========
08:42:38
Democrats and Republicans have become much more than just two competing parties,
sorted into liberal and conservative camps. Their voters are now deeply divided by
race, religious belief, geography, and even “way of life.”
==========
08:43:17
In 2010, by contrast, 33 percent of Democrats and 49 percent of Republicans

reported feeling “somewhat or very unhappy” at the prospect of interparty marriage.
Being a Democrat or a Republican has become not just a partisan affiliation but an
identity.
==========
08:43:28
2016 survey conducted by the Pew Foundation found that 49 percent of Republicans
and 55 percent of Democrats say the other party makes them “afraid.”
==========
08:43:50
These surveys point to the rise of a dangerous phenomenon in American politics:

intense partisan animosity.
==========
08:46:15
The racial appeals of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and, later on, Ronald Reagan’s
coded messages about race communicated to voters that the GOP was the home for
white racial conservatives. By century’s end, what had long been a solidly
Democratic region had become solidly Republican.
==========
08:46:28
As the South went Republican, the Northeast went reliably blue.

==========
08:47:12
Now that most senators and representatives had more in common with their partisan
allies than with members of the opposing party, they cooperated less frequently and
voted consistently with their own party. As both voters and their elected
representatives clustered into increasingly homogeneous “camps,” the ideological
differences between the parties grew more marked.
==========
08:47:57
Voters are ideologically sorted in Britain, Germany, and Sweden, but in none of
these countries do we see the kind of partisan hatred we now see in America.
==========
08:50:02
Together with black enfranchisement, immigration has transformed American political

parties. These new voters have disproportionately supported the Democratic Party.
The nonwhite share of the Democratic vote rose from 7 percent in the 1950s to
44 percent in 2012. Republican voters, by contrast, were still nearly 90 percent
white into the 2000s. So as the Democrats have increasingly become a party of
ethnic minorities, the Republican Party has remained almost entirely a party of
whites.
==========
08:51:53
The Republican Party has also become the party of evangelical Christians.
Evangelicals entered politics en masse in the late 1970s, motivated, in large part,
by the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.
==========
08:54:35
White evangelicals—who had leaned Democratic in the 1960s—began to vote Republican.

In 2016, 76 percent of white evangelicals identified as Republican. Democratic
voters, in turn, grew increasingly secular. The percentage of white Democrats who
attended church regularly fell from nearly 50 percent in the 1960s to below
30 percent in the 2000s.
==========
08:55:35
In other words, the two parties are now divided over race and religion—two deeply
polarizing issues that tend to generate greater intolerance and hostility than
traditional policy issues such as taxes and government spending.
==========
08:55:53
But why was most of the norm breaking being done by the Republican Party? For one,
the changing media landscape had a stronger impact on the Republican Party.
Republican voters rely more heavily on partisan media outlets than do Democrats. In
2010, 69 percent of Republican voters were Fox News viewers. And popular radio
talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Mark Levin,
and Laura Ingraham, all of whom have helped to legitimate the use of uncivil
discourse, have few counterparts among liberals.
==========
08:56:43
As former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott put it, “If you stray the
slightest from the far right, you get hit by the conservative media.”
==========
08:57:38
Along with the Tea Party, the Koch network and other similar organizations helped
elect a new generation of Republicans for whom compromise was a dirty word. A party
with a core that was hollowed out by donors and pressure groups was also more
vulnerable to extremist forces.
==========
08:58:36
historian Richard Hofstadter described the phenomenon of “status anxiety,” which,

he believed, is most likely to emerge when groups’ social status, identity, and
sense of belonging are
==========
08:58:45
historian Richard Hofstadter described the phenomenon of “status anxiety,” which,

he believed, is most likely to emerge when groups’ social status, identity, and
sense of belonging are perceived to be under existential threat. This leads to a
style of politics that is “overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose,
and apocalyptic.”
==========
08:59:19
To quote the title of sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s recent book, they perceive
themselves to be “strangers in their own land.”
==========
16:18:33
President Trump also tried to punish or purge agencies that acted with
independence. Most prominently, he dismissed Comey after it became clear that Comey
could not be pressured into protecting the administration and was expanding its
Russia investigation.
==========
16:22:09
As we noted earlier, the chief executive’s constitutional power to pardon is

without limit, but presidents have historically exercised it with great restraint,
==========
16:22:13
==========
16:22:18

seeking advice from the Justice Department and never issuing pardons for self-
protection or political gain.
==========
16:22:23

seeking advice from the Justice Department and never issuing pardons for self-
protection or political gain.
==========
16:22:38
President Trump boldly violated these norms. Not only did he not consult the
Justice Department, but the pardon was clearly political—it was popular with his
base. The move reinforced fears that the president would eventually pardon himself
and his inner circle—something that was reportedly explored by his lawyers. Such a
move would constitute an unprecedented attack on judicial independence.
==========
16:26:10
a February 2017 tweet, he called the media the “enemy of the American people,” a
term that, critics noted, mimicked one used by Stalin and Mao. Trump’s rhetoric was
often threatening.
==========
09:11:26
President Trump exhibited clear authoritarian instincts during his first year in
office. In Chapter 4, we presented three strategies by which elected authoritarians
seek to consolidate power: capturing the referees, sidelining the key players, and
rewriting the rules to tilt the playing field against opponents.
==========
09:18:34
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa used this approach. His multimillion-dollar

defamation suits and jailing of journalists on charges of defamation had a
powerfully chilling effect on the media. Although Trump dropped the libel issue, he
continued his threats.
==========
09:19:51
President Trump signed an executive order authorizing federal agencies to withhold

funding from “sanctuary cities” that refused to cooperate with the administration’s
crackdown on undocumented immigrants. “If we have to,” he declared in
February 2017, “we’ll defund.” The plan was reminiscent of the Chávez government’s
repeated moves to strip opposition-run city governments of their control over local
hospitals, police forces, ports, and other infrastructure.
==========
09:22:05
The push for voter ID laws was based on a false claim: that voter fraud is
widespread in the United States. All reputable studies have concluded that levels
of such fraud in this country are low. Yet Republicans began to push for measures
to combat this nonexistent problem.
==========
09:22:25
An estimated 300,000 Georgia voters lacked the required forms of ID, and African
Americans were five times more likely than whites to lack them.
==========
09:22:40
Judge Terence Evans of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals called “a not-too-
thinly veiled attempt to discourage election day turnout by certain folks believed
to skew Democratic,”
==========
09:23:26
Voter ID laws are almost certain to have a disproportionate impact on low-income

minority voters: According to one study, 37 percent of African Americans and
27 percent of Latinos reported not possessing a valid driver’s license, compared to
16 percent of whites.
==========
09:24:24
“premier advocate of vote suppression.”

==========
09:25:48
Commission’s early activities suggested that its objective was voter suppression.
First, it is collecting stories of fraud from across the country, which could
provide political ammunition for state-level voter-restriction initiatives or,
perhaps, for efforts to repeal the 1993 “Motor Voter” law.
==========
09:26:02
In effect, the Commission is poised to serve as a high-profile national mouthpiece

for Republican efforts to pass tougher voter ID laws. Second, the Commission aims
to encourage or facilitate state-level voter roll purges, which, existing research
suggests, would invariably remove many legitimate voters.
==========
09:28:40
By contrast, in Peru under Fujimori and Turkey under Erdoğan, there was no initial
backsliding. Fujimori engaged in heated rhetorical battles during his first year as
president but did not assault democratic institutions until nearly two years in.
Breakdown took even longer in Turkey.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 169 | location 2579 | Added on Tuesday, 19 June 2018
09:29:00
==========
09:34:28
Another factor affecting the fate of our democracy is public opinion. If would-be
authoritarians can’t turn to the military or organize large-scale violence, they
must find other means of persuading allies to go along and critics to back off or
give up.
==========
09:34:45
When an elected leader enjoys, say, a 70 percent approval rating, critics jump on
the bandwagon, media coverage softens, judges grow more reluctant to rule against
the government, and even rival politicians, worried that strident opposition will
leave them isolated, tend to keep their heads down.
==========
09:35:01
By contrast, when the government’s approval rating is low, media and opposition
grow more brazen, judges become emboldened to stand up to the president, and allies
begin to dissent. Fujimori, Chávez, and Erdoğan all enjoyed massive popularity when
they launched their assault on democratic institutions.
==========
09:36:04
If Democrats across the country behaved as they did in West Virginia, President
Trump would face little resistance—even on the issue of foreign interference in our
election.
==========
09:36:32
Bush administration’s inept response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, can erode public
support. But other developments, such as security threats, can boost it.
==========
09:36:57
Major security crises—wars or large-scale terrorist attacks—are political game

changers. Almost invariably, they increase support for the government. Citizens
become more likely to tolerate, and even endorse, authoritarian measures when they
fear for their security. And it’s not only average citizens who respond this way.
Judges are notoriously reluctant to block presidential power grabs in the midst of
crises, when national security is perceived to be at risk. According to political
scientist William Howell,
==========
09:37:05
Major security crises—wars or large-scale terrorist attacks—are political game

changers. Almost invariably, they increase support for the government. Citizens
become more likely to tolerate, and even endorse, authoritarian measures when they
fear for their security. And it’s not only average citizens who respond this way.
Judges are notoriously reluctant to block presidential power grabs in the midst of
crises, when national security is perceived to be at risk.
==========
09:37:12
institutional constraints on President Bush disappeared in the wake of the 9/11

attacks, allowing Bush to “do whatever he liked to define and respond to the
crisis.”
==========
09:37:25
Security crises are, therefore, moments of danger for democracy. Leaders who can
“do whatever they like” can inflict great harm upon democratic institutions.
==========
09:37:37
For a would-be authoritarian who feels unfairly besieged by opponents and shackled
by democratic institutions, crisis opens up a window of opportunity.
==========
09:39:52
Many violations are innocuous. In January 1977, Jimmy Carter surprised the police,
the press, and the 250,000 Americans gathered to watch his inauguration when he and
his wife walked the mile and a half from the Capitol to the White House. The New
York Daily News described the Carters’ decision to abandon the “closed and armored
limousine” as an “unprecedented departure from custom.” Ever since, it has become
what the New York Times called “an informal custom” for the president-elect to at
least step out of his protected limousine during the inaugural parade to show that
he is “the people’s president.”
==========
09:40:06
The previous norm had been for candidates to avoid campaigning, preserving a
Cincinnatus-like fiction that they harbored no personal ambition for power—but
limiting voters’ ability to get to know them.
==========
09:41:05
In the face of the uproar, the White House’s press operation first denied the event
happened, later said it had “merely” been a lunch, and then defended it by saying
that at least no women had been present.
==========
09:41:37
But Donald Trump’s norm violations in his first year of office differed
fundamentally from those of his predecessors. For one, he was a serial norm
breaker. Never has a president flouted so many unwritten rules so quickly. Many of
the transgressions were trivial—President Trump broke a 150-year White House
tradition by not having a pet. Others were more ominous. Trump’s first inaugural
address, for example, was darker than such addresses typically are (he spoke, for
example, of “American carnage”), leading former President George W. Bush to
observe: “That was some weird shit.”
==========
09:42:01
Among these are long-standing norms of separating private and public affairs, such
as those governing nepotism. Existing legislation, which
==========
09:42:11
Among these are long-standing norms of separating private and public affairs, such
as those governing nepotism. Existing legislation, which prohibits presidents from
appointing family members to the cabinet or agency positions, does not include
White House staff positions. So Trump’s appointment of his daughter, Ivanka, and
son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to high-level advisory posts was technically legal—but
it flouted the spirit of the law.
==========
09:44:07
In Mexico, after the losing presidential candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador,
insisted that the
==========
09:44:16
insisted that the 2006 election was stolen from him, confidence in Mexico’s
electoral system declined. A poll taken prior to the 2012 presidential election
==========
09:44:17
==========
09:44:26
candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, insisted that the 2006 election was stolen
from him, confidence in Mexico’s electoral system declined. A poll taken prior to
the 2012 presidential election found that 71 percent of Mexicans believed that
fraud could be in play. In the United States, the figures were even more dramatic.
In a survey carried out prior to the 2016 election, 84 percent of Republican voters
said they
==========
09:44:34
found that 71 percent of Mexicans believed that fraud could be in play. In the
United States, the figures were even more dramatic. In a survey carried out prior
to the 2016 election, 84 percent of Republican voters said they believed a
“meaningful amount” of fraud occurred in American elections, and nearly 60 percent
of Republican voters said they believed illegal
==========
09:44:49
of Republican voters said they believed illegal immigrants would “vote in
meaningful amounts” in November. These doubts persisted after the election.
According to a July 2017 Morning Consult/Politico poll, 47 percent of Republicans
believed that Trump won the popular vote, compared to 40 percent who believed
Hillary Clinton won. In other words, about half of self-identified Republicans said
they believe that American elections
==========
09:45:09
of Republican voters said they believed illegal immigrants would “vote in
meaningful amounts” in November.
==========
09:45:15
Donald Trump were to say that the 2020 presidential election should be postponed
until the country can make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote,
would you support or oppose postponing the election?” Fifty-two percent of
Republicans said they would support postponement. President Trump also abandoned
==========
09:45:23
“If Donald Trump were to say that the 2020 presidential election should be
postponed until the country can make sure that only eligible American citizens can
vote, would you support or oppose postponing the election?” Fifty-two percent of
Republicans said they would support postponement.
==========
09:45:28
He broke with norms of postelection reconciliation by continuing to attack Hillary

Clinton.
==========
09:45:36
He also violated the unwritten rule that sitting presidents should not attack their
predecessor. At 6:35 A.M. on March 4, 2017, President Trump tweeted, “Terrible!
Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the
victory.
==========
09:46:00
Perhaps President Trump’s most notorious norm-breaking behavior has been lying.
==========
09:46:32
Given this norm, politicians typically avoid lying by changing the topic of debate,
reframing difficult questions, or only partly answering them. President Trump’s
routine, brazen fabrications are unprecedented. His tendencies were manifest during
the 2016 campaign. PolitiFact classified 69 percent of his public statements as
“mostly false” (21 percent), “false” (33 percent), or “pants on fire” (15 percent).
Only 17 percent were coded as “true” or “mostly true.”
==========
09:47:12
ones—President Trump “achieved something remarkable”: He made at least one false or

misleading public statement every single day of his first forty days in office.
==========
09:47:55
President Trump himself did not pay much of a price for his lies. In a political
and media environment in which engaged citizens increasingly filter events through
their own partisan lenses, his supporters did not come to view him as dishonest
during the first year of his presidency.
==========
09:48:21
For our political system, however, the consequences of his dishonesty are
devastating. Citizens have a basic right to information in a democracy. Without
credible information about what our elected leaders do, we cannot effectively
exercise our right to vote. When the president of the United States lies to the
public, our access to credible information is jeopardized, and trust in government
is eroded (how could it not be?). When citizens do not believe their elected
leaders, the foundations of representative democracy weaken. The value of elections
is diminished when citizens have no faith in the leaders they elect.
==========
09:48:35
Exacerbating this loss of faith is President Trump’s abandonment of basic norms of

respect for the media.
==========
09:48:54
Many of them privately despised it. But with few exceptions, U.S. presidents have
recognized the media’s centrality as a democratic institution and respected its
place in the political system.
==========
09:49:34
President Trump’s public insults of media outlets and even individual journalists
were without precedent in modern U.S. history. He described the media as “among the
most dishonest human beings on Earth,” and repeatedly accused such critical news
outlets as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN of lying or delivering
“fake news.”
==========
09:50:11
Even Richard Nixon, who privately viewed the media as “the enemy,” never made such
public attacks.
==========
09:50:28
The Trump administration also broke established norms by selectively excluding

reporters from press events.
==========
09:50:56
The only modern precedent for such a move was Nixon’s decision to bar the
Washington Post from the White House after it broke the Watergate scandal.
==========
09:52:08
Under President Trump, America has been defining political deviancy down. The
president’s routine use of personal insult, bullying, lying, and cheating has,
inevitably, helped to normalize such practices. Trump’s tweets may trigger outrage
from the media, Democrats,
==========
09:52:24
Under President Trump, America has been defining political deviancy down. The
president’s routine use of personal insult, bullying, lying, and cheating has,
inevitably, helped to normalize such practices. Trump’s tweets may trigger outrage
from the media, Democrats, and some Republicans, but the effectiveness of their
responses is limited by the sheer quantity of violations. As Moynihan observed, in
the face of widespread deviance, we become overwhelmed—and then desensitized. We
grow accustomed to what we previously thought to be scandalous.
==========
09:52:54
There is no “containment” strategy for an endless stream of offensive tweets.

==========
09:53:10
This will have terrible consequences for our democracy. President Trump’s assault
on basic norms has expanded the bounds of acceptable political behavior.
==========
09:54:07
In other words, a majority of Republican voters said they support the kind of media
repression seen in recent years in Ecuador, Turkey, and Venezuela.
==========
09:55:28
The NRA is not a small, fringe organization. It claims five million members and is
closely tied to the Republican Party—Donald Trump and Sarah Palin are lifetime
members.
==========
09:55:35
Yet it now uses words that in the past we would have regarded as dangerously
politically deviant.
==========
09:55:44
Norms are the soft guardrails of democracy; as they break down, the zone of
acceptable political behavior expands, giving rise to discourse and action that
could imperil democracy. Behavior that was once considered unthinkable in American
politics is becoming thinkable.
==========
09:55:55
Even if Donald Trump does not break the hard guardrails of our constitutional
democracy, he has increased the likelihood that a future president will.
==========
09:56:43
It was only after 1965 that the United States fully democratized.
==========
09:56:45
It was only after 1965 that the United States fully democratized.
==========
09:58:04
And although European democracies face many problems, from weak economies to EU
skepticism to anti-immigrant backlash, there is little evidence in any of them of
the kind of fundamental erosion of norms we have seen in the United States.
==========
09:58:50
The 1990–2015 period was easily the most democratic quarter century in world
history—partly because Western powers broadly supported democracy.
==========
09:58:56
That may now be changing. Under Donald Trump, the United States appears to be
abandoning its role as democracy promoter for the first time since the Cold War.
==========
09:59:20
President Trump’s is the least prodemocratic of any U.S. administration since

Nixon’s. Moreover, America is no longer a democratic model. A country whose
president attacks the press, threatens to lock up his rival, and declares that he
might not accept election results cannot credibly defend democracy. Both existing
and potential autocrats are likely to be emboldened with Trump in the White House.
==========
10:00:28
The Trump interlude would be taught in schools, recounted in films, and recited in
historical works as an era of tragic mistakes where catastrophe was avoided and
American democracy saved.
==========
10:00:59
This is certainly the future many of us hope for. But it is unlikely. Recall that
the assault on long-standing democratic norms—and the underlying polarization
driving it—began well before Donald Trump ascended to the White House. The soft
guardrails of American democracy have been weakening for decades; simply removing
President Trump will not miraculously restore them. Although Trump’s presidency may
ultimately be seen as a momentary aberration with only modest footprints on our
institutions, ending it may not be enough to restore a healthy democracy.
==========
10:01:49
A second, much darker future is one in which President Trump and the Republicans
continue to win with a white nationalist appeal. Under this scenario, a pro-Trump
GOP would retain the presidency, both houses of Congress, and the vast majority of
statehouses, and it would eventually gain a solid majority in the Supreme Court. It
would then use the techniques of constitutional hardball to manufacture durable
white electoral majorities. This could be done through a combination of large-scale
deportation, immigration restrictions, the purging of voter rolls, and the adoption
of strict voter ID laws. Measures to reengineer the electorate would likely be
accompanied by elimination of the filibuster and other rules that protect Senate
minorities, so that Republicans could impose their agenda even with narrow
majorities. These measures may appear extreme, but every one of them has been at
least contemplated by the Trump administration.
==========
10:04:34
North Carolina’s electorate resembles the national one: It is evenly split between
Democrats and Republicans, with Democrats dominant in such urban centers as
Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham and Republicans dominant in rural areas.
==========
10:06:34
They passed a strict voter ID law, reduced opportunities for early voting, ended
preregistration for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, eliminated same-day
registration, and slashed the number of polling places in several key counties.
==========
10:11:27
gerrymandering,
==========
10:12:29
North Carolina offers a window into what politics without guardrails looks like—and
a possible glimpse into America’s future. When partisan rivals become enemies,
political competition descends into warfare, and our institutions turn into
weapons. The result is a system hovering constantly on the brink of crisis.
==========
10:12:48
This grim scenario highlights a central lesson of this book: When American
democracy has worked, it has relied upon two norms that we often take for granted—
mutual tolerance and institutional forbearance.
==========
10:12:59
Treating rivals as legitimate contenders for power and underutilizing one’s

institutional prerogatives in the spirit of fair play are not written into the
American Constitution. Yet without them, our constitutional checks and balances
will not operate as we expect them
==========
10:13:50
Without innovations such as political parties and their accompanying norms, the
Constitution they so carefully constructed in Philadelphia would not have survived.
Institutions were more than just formal rules; they encompassed the shared
understandings of appropriate behavior that overlay them.
==========
10:14:19
The strength of the American political system, it has often been said, rests on
what Swedish Nobel Prize–winning economist Gunnar Myrdal called the American Creed:
the principles of individual freedom and egalitarianism.
==========
10:14:27
repeated in classrooms, speeches, and editorial pages, freedom and equality are
self-justifying values. But they are not self-executing.
==========
10:14:39
Mutual toleration and institutional forbearance are procedural principles—they tell

politicians how to behave, beyond the bounds of law, to make our institutions
function.
==========
10:14:46
We should regard these procedural values as also sitting at the center of the
American Creed—for without them, our democracy would not work.
==========
10:15:33
The GOP’s refusal to allow President Obama to fill a Supreme Court vacancy left
Democrats feeling sucker-punched, particularly after Trump’s victory ensured that
they would get away with it. Political scientist and writer David Faris typified
the calls to “fight dirty”:
==========
10:16:28
In an op-ed entitled “Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans,” published a
month before Trump’s inauguration, Dahlia Lithwick and David S. Cohen lamented that
Democrats were “doing little to stop him.” Although there was “no shortage of legal
theories that could challenge Mr.
==========
10:16:42
In an op-ed entitled “Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans,” published a
month before Trump’s inauguration, Dahlia Lithwick and David S. Cohen lamented that
Democrats were “doing little to stop him.” Although there was “no shortage of legal
theories that could challenge Mr. Trump’s anointment,” they wrote, Democrats were
not pursuing them. Lithwick and Cohen argued that Democrats “should be fighting
tooth and nail” to prevent Donald Trump from taking office—pushing recounts and
fraud investigations in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, seeking to sway the
Electoral College, and even trying to overturn President Trump’s victory in court.
==========
10:18:55
This is what happened in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez. Although the first few years
of Chávez’s presidency were democratic, opponents found his populist discourse
terrifying. Fearful that Chávez would steer Venezuela toward Cuban-style socialism,
they tried to remove him preemptively—and by any means necessary.
==========
10:19:35
Not only did they fail to knock Chávez out, but they eroded the opposition’s public
support, allowed Chávez to tag his rivals as antidemocratic, and handed the
government an excuse to purge the military, the police, and the courts, arrest or
exile dissidents, and close independent media outlets.
==========
10:19:47
In April 2002, opposition leaders backed a military coup, which not only failed but
destroyed their image as democrats. Undeterred, the opposition launched an
indefinite general strike in December 2002, seeking to shut the country down until
Chávez resigned. The strike lasted two months, costing Venezuela an estimated
$4.5 billion and ultimately failing.
==========
10:21:28
with. As much as a third of the country would likely view Trump’s impeachment as
the machinations of a vast left-wing conspiracy—maybe even as a coup. American
politics would be left dangerously unmoored.
==========
10:21:42
If Democrats do not work to restore norms of mutual toleration and forbearance,

their next president will likely confront an opposition willing to use any means
necessary to defeat them.
==========
10:21:49
And if partisan rifts deepen and our unwritten rules continue to fray, Americans
could eventually elect a president who is even more dangerous than Trump.
==========
10:23:31
Coalitions of the like-minded are important, but they are not enough to defend
democracy. The most effective coalitions are those that bring together groups with
dissimilar—even opposing—views on many issues. They are built not among friends but
among adversaries. An effective coalition in defense of American democracy, then,
would likely require that progressives forge alliances with business executives,
religious (and particularly white evangelical) leaders, and red-state
==========
10:24:05
When major businesses join progressive boycotts, they often succeed.

==========
10:25:44
Where a society’s political divisions are crosscutting, we line up on different

sides of issues with different people at different times. We may disagree with our
neighbors on abortion but agree with them on health care; we may dislike another
neighbor’s views on immigration but agree with them on the need to raise the
minimum wage.
==========
10:26:18
Thinking about how to resist the Trump administration’s abuses is clearly

important. However, the fundamental problem facing American democracy remains
extreme partisan division—one fueled not just by policy differences but by deeper
sources of resentment, including racial and religious differences. America’s great
polarization preceded the Trump presidency, and it is very likely to endure beyond
==========
10:26:29
Thinking about how to resist the Trump administration’s abuses is clearly

important. However, the fundamental problem facing American democracy remains
extreme partisan division—one fueled not just by policy differences but by deeper
sources of resentment, including racial and religious differences. America’s great
polarization preceded the Trump presidency, and it is very likely to endure beyond
it.
==========
10:32:22
Chile’s new democracy, leaders developed a practice of informal cooperation—which

Chileans called “democracy of agreements”—in which presidents consulted the leaders
of all parties before submitting legislation to congress.
==========
10:33:11
It’s easy for politicians to bemoan the absence of civility and cooperation, or to
wax nostalgic about the bipartisanship of a bygone era.
==========
10:33:23
But norm creation is a collective venture—it is only possible when a critical mass
of leaders accepts and plays by new unwritten rules. This usually happens when
political leaders from across the spectrum have stared into the abyss and realized
that if they do not find a way of addressing polarization, democracy will die.
==========
10:33:55
In the United States, political scientists have proposed an array of electoral

reforms—an end to gerrymandering, open primaries, obligatory voting, alternative
rules for electing members of Congress, to name just a few—that might mitigate
partisan enmity in America.
==========
10:36:32
Reducing polarization requires that the Republican Party be reformed, if not

refounded outright. First of all, the GOP must rebuild its own establishment. This
means regaining leadership control in four key areas: finance, grassroots
organization, messaging, and candidate selection.
==========
10:36:39
Only if the party leadership can free itself from the clutches of outside donors
and right-wing media can it go about transforming itself. This entails major
changes: Republicans must marginalize extremist elements; they must build a more
diverse electoral constituency, such that the party no longer depends so heavily on
its shrinking white Christian base; and they must find ways to win elections
without appealing to white nationalism, or what Republican Arizona senator Jeff
Flake calls the “sugar high of populism, nativism, and demagoguery.”
==========
10:38:39
CDU leader Andreas Hermes gave a sense of the scale of the rupture, commenting in
1945: “An old world has sunk and we want to build a new one….” The CDU offered a
clear vision of a democratic future for Germany: a “Christian” society that
rejected dictatorship and embraced freedom and tolerance. The CDU
==========
10:38:54
CDU leader Andreas Hermes gave a sense of the scale of the rupture, commenting in
1945: “An old world has sunk and we want to build a new one….” The CDU offered a
clear vision of a democratic future for Germany: a “Christian” society that
rejected dictatorship and embraced freedom and tolerance.
==========
10:39:02
The CDU also broadened and diversified its base, by recruiting both Catholics and
Protestants into the fold. This was a challenge. But the trauma of Nazism and World
War II convinced conservative Catholic and Protestant leaders to overcome the long-
standing differences that had once splintered German society.
==========
10:39:31
The CDU became a pillar of Germany’s postwar democracy.

==========
10:39:44
Christian Democratic Union (CDU)

==========
10:50:47
We think this is a terrible idea. Seeking to diminish minority groups’ influence in

the party—and we cannot emphasize this strongly enough—is the wrong way to reduce
polarization. It would repeat some of our country’s most shameful mistakes. The
founding of the American republic left racial domination intact, which eventually
led to the Civil War.
==========
10:51:05
The simple fact of the matter is that the world has never built a multiethnic
democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where
political equality, social equality and economies that empower all have been
achieved.
==========
10:51:11
This is America’s great challenge. We cannot retreat from it.

==========
10:51:31
The intensity of partisan animosities in America today reflects the combined effect
not only of growing ethnic diversity but also of slowed economic growth, stagnant
wages in the bottom half of the income distribution, and rising economic
inequality.
==========
10:52:45
Policies aimed at addressing economic inequality can be polarizing or depolarizing,

depending on how they are organized. Unlike in many other advanced democracies,
social policy in America has relied heavily on means tests—distributing benefits
only to those who fall below an income threshold or otherwise qualify. Means-tested
programs create the perception among many middle-class citizens that only poor
people benefit from social policy. And because race and poverty have historically
overlapped in the United States, these policies can be racially stigmatizing.
==========
10:52:52
programs—Ronald Reagan’s references to “welfare queens” or “young bucks” buying

steaks with food stamps is a prime example.
==========
10:52:57
Opponents of social policy have commonly used racially charged rhetoric against
means-tested programs—Ronald Reagan’s references to “welfare queens” or “young
bucks” buying steaks with food stamps is a prime example. Welfare became a
pejorative term in America because of a perception of recipients as undeserving.
==========
10:53:25
politics. Social policies that benefit everyone—Social Security and Medicare are
prime examples—could help diminish resentment, build bridges across large swaths of
the American electorate, and lock into place social support for more durable
policies to reduce income inequality—without providing the raw materials for
racially motivated backlash.
==========
10:53:41
Comprehensive health insurance is a prominent example. Other examples include a

much more aggressive raising of the minimum wage, or a universal basic income—a
policy that was once seriously considered, and even introduced into Congress, by
the Nixon administration.
==========
10:53:52
“family policy,” or programs that provide paid leave for parents, subsidized day
care for children with working parents, and prekindergarten education for nearly
everyone.
==========
10:54:16
Democrats could consider more comprehensive labor market policies, such as more
extensive job training, wage subsidies for employers to train and retain workers,
work-study programs for high school and community-college students, and mobility
allowances for displaced employees.
==========
10:55:41
No single political leader can end a democracy; no single leader can rescue one,
either. Democracy is a shared enterprise. Its fate depends on all of us.
==========
10:56:27
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right
more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the
feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.
==========
10:56:40
Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t
been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad.
==========
10:57:21
To save our democracy, Americans need to restore the basic norms that once
protected it. But we must do more than that. We must extend those norms through the
whole of a diverse society. We must make them truly inclusive. America’s democratic
norms, at their core, have always been sound. But for much of our history, they
were accompanied—indeed, sustained—by racial exclusion.
==========
Robin (Dave Itzkoff)
11:48:59
impressionist or a close observer of quotidian detail. He

==========
11:49:04
He was more like an illusionist, and his magic trick was making you see what he
wanted you to see—the act and not the artist delivering it.
==========
15:23:23
“The craziness comes from my mother. The discipline comes from my dad.”
==========
15:36:06
“What drives you to perform is the need for that primal connection,”
==========
15:36:15
and I learned that by being entertaining, you make a connection with another
person.”
==========
15:53:19
The school was engineered to groom its students for prestigious colleges and future
leadership roles, and Robin thrived on the rigor.
==========
War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence (Ronan
Farrow)
08:55:15
The work this mission entailed was classic, old-school diplomacy, which is to say
it was frustrating and involved a lot of jet lag.
==========
Farrow)
08:56:57
Diplomats perform many essential functions—spiriting Americans out of crises,

holding together developing economies, hammering out deals between governments.
==========
09:30:56
But an invisible revolution was taking place in Robin’s mind, allowing him to see,
for perhaps the first time in his life, that he had the ability to choose his own
path.
==========
09:32:19
Women, he said, were “amazing creatures”: “You can never learn enough! They’re
addicting in the most amazing sense.”
==========
09:34:38
He described the troupe as “a gaggle of talented and imaginative youngsters

zealously tackling the problem of ‘What will we do when the curtain goes up and
we’ve forgotten our lines?’”
==========
09:34:44
“It generally seems that they are having more fun than the audience,” comparing the
experience to “watching football practice.”
==========
09:45:51
To Blum, Robin appeared to lack some basic social skills, whether making simple
chitchat or engaging in “the bullshit that everybody would talk about when they
were stoned.”
==========
09:51:43
“It had a very monastic, religious feeling about it,”

==========
09:52:36
the long working hours, spent almost exclusively in the company of classmates, gave
rise to many passionately forged, rapidly depleted relationships over the span of a
semester.
==========
10:08:25
Among them, Oppenheimer said, was the character of a mask maker, a piece that he
had previously seen performed by Marcel Marceau. “It’s a guy sitting on a bench
making masks,” he explained, “and he keeps trying them on. There’s an angry face,
and a sad face and a laughing face. He eventually gets one stuck on, and it’s the
smiling face. And as he realizes it’s stuck, he goes through a whole sequence of
emotions—but his face has to remain smiling.”
==========
Farrow)
09:33:54
The Trump administration broke from that tradition: shortly after taking office,
the new administration ordered all politically appointed ambassadors to depart
immediately, faster than usual.
==========
Farrow)
09:34:19
Countryman began to fear that the next target would be the contractors hired under
an authority specifically designed to bring subject matter experts into American
diplomacy. The Department was full of these. They played pivotal roles in offices
overseeing the most sensitive areas of American foreign policy,
==========
Farrow)
09:35:04
He had been around a long time. He had his pension. But it was a troubling affront
to institutional culture.
==========
Farrow)
09:38:30
“No one’s asking us for anything, we’re totally cut off, we’re not invited to
meetings, we had to fight for every White House meeting,” she remembered. “Our
morning meetings were, ‘well, have you heard this rumor?’ That was no way to
formulate US foreign policy.”
==========
Farrow)
09:42:06
“The culture of the State Department is so eroded,” she remarked. It was an

institution more than a dozen career diplomats told me they barely recognized, one
in which their expertise had been profoundly devalued. Squinting into the afternoon
sun, Erin Clancy paused. “We are truly seen as outsiders,” she said.
==========
Farrow)
09:43:06
For the basic function of delivering messages in foreign lands, email was more
efficient than any ambassador. The prestige and power of the Foreign Service were
in decline.
==========
Farrow)
09:44:06
“Unprecedented,” blared Foreign Policy and a host of other publications on what was
being described as the Trump administration’s
==========
Farrow)
09:44:12
“Unprecedented,” blared Foreign Policy and a host of other publications on what was
being described as the Trump administration’s “assault” or “war” on the State
Department.
==========
Farrow)
09:44:56
Where civilians are not empowered to negotiate, military-to-military dealings still

flourish.
==========
Farrow)
09:45:04
America has changed whom it brings to the table, and, by extension, it has changed
who sits at the other side. Foreign ministries are still there. But foreign
militaries and militias often have the better seats.
==========
Farrow)
09:45:19
“America’s military might, used judiciously and with strategic precision, is a
critical tool of diplomacy,” James Baker, George H.
==========
Farrow)
09:45:29
“I’ve always said ‘diplomacy works best when it comes in a mailed

==========
Farrow)
09:45:35
“I’ve always said ‘diplomacy works best when it comes in a mailed fist.’ ”
==========
Farrow)
09:48:10
Two decades later, Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear aspirations and the Islamic
State’s global recruitment are among the United States’ most pressing international
challenges.
==========
Farrow)
09:48:26
Thomas Friedman raced to the scene with a visual metaphor, lamenting that the
United States was “turning its back on the past and the future of U.S. foreign
policy for the sake of the present.”
==========
Farrow)
09:49:35
Defense spending, on the other hand, skyrocketed to historic extremes, far

outpacing the modest growth at State.
==========
Farrow)
12:23:02
Over the course of his presidency, Barack Obama approved more than double the
dollar value of arms deals with foreign regimes than George W. Bush had before him.
In fact, the Obama administration sold more arms than any other since World War II.
When I pressed Hillary Clinton on those facts, she seemed taken aback. “I’m not
saying it was perfect,” she told me. “As you made out, there were decisions that
had increased military commitments associated with them.” In the end, however, she
felt the Obama administration had gotten “more right than wrong,” when it came to
the militarization of foreign policy. She cited, as an example, the emphasis on
diplomacy that accompanied the Afghanistan review in which she participated. But
that review was held up, by both State Department and White House officials, as a
deep source of regret and an acute example of the exclusion of civilians from
meaningful foreign policymaking.
==========
Pinker)
12:30:14
Our unhappiness, they say, is payback for our worship of the individual and
material wealth and for our acquiescence in the corrosion of family, tradition,
religion, and community.
==========
Pinker)
12:39:41
A modicum of anxiety may be the price we pay for the uncertainty of freedom. It is
another word for the vigilance, deliberation, and heart-searching that freedom
demands.
==========
Pinker)
12:39:50
It’s not entirely surprising that as women gained in autonomy relative to men they
also slipped in happiness.
==========
Pinker)
12:40:03
In earlier times, women’s list of responsibilities rarely extended beyond the

domestic sphere. Today young women increasingly say that their life goals include
career, family, marriage, money, recreation, friendship, experience, correcting
social inequities, being a leader in their community, and making a contribution to
society.
==========
Pinker)
08:44:27
One scientist warned that although the first two might be survivable, the third
definitely was not. Boredom, really? You see, as people no longer have to work all
day and think about where their next meal is coming from, they will be at a loss as
to how to fill their waking hours, and will be vulnerable to debauchery, insanity,
suicide, and the sway of religious and political fanatics.
==========
Pinker)
08:45:37
The original definition of Enlightenment, after all, was “humankind’s emergence

from its self-incurred immaturity.”
==========
Pinker)
18:41:06
But are we flirting with disaster? When pessimists are forced to concede that life
has been getting better and better for more and more people, they have a retort at
the ready. We are cheerfully hurtling toward a catastrophe, they say, like the man
who fell off the roof and says “So far so good” as he passes each floor.
==========
Pinker)
18:41:27
For half a century the four horsemen of the modern apocalypse have been
overpopulation, resource shortages, pollution, and nuclear war.
==========
Pinker)
18:43:29
but we can treat them not as apocalypses in waiting but as problems to be solved.
==========
Pinker)
18:44:26
And as we shall see, one of the reasons the great powers refuse to take the common-
sense pledge that they won’t be the first to use nuclear weapons is that they want
to reserve the right to use them against other supposed existential threats such as
bioterror and cyberattacks.2 Sowing fear about hypothetical disasters, far from
safeguarding the future of humanity, can endanger it.
==========
Pinker)
18:46:19
As Elin Kelsey, an environmental communicator, points out, “We have media ratings
to protect children from sex or violence in movies, but we think nothing of
inviting a scientist into a second grade classroom and telling the kids the planet
is ruined. A quarter of (Australian) children are so troubled about the state of
the world that they honestly believe it will come to an end before they get older.”
==========
Pinker)
18:46:38
Gregg Easterbrook suggests that a major reason that Americans are not happier,
despite their rising objective fortunes, is “collapse anxiety”: the fear that
civilization may implode and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
==========
Pinker)
18:51:28
The Great Y2K Panic does not mean that all warnings of potential catastrophes are
false alarms, but it reminds us that we are vulnerable to techno-apocalyptic
delusions.
==========
Pinker)
18:57:02
Even if we did invent superhumanly intelligent robots, why would they want to
enslave their masters or take over the world? Intelligence is the ability to deploy
novel means to attain a goal. But the goals are extraneous to the intelligence:
being smart is not the same as wanting something.
==========
Pinker)
18:57:11
just so happens that the intelligence in one system, Homo sapiens, is a product of
Darwinian natural selection, an inherently competitive process.
==========
Pinker)
- Your Bookmark on page 367 | location 5620 | Added on Friday, 22 June 2018
18:57:27
==========
Pinker)
18:59:24
Devouring the information on the Internet will not confer omniscience either: big
data is still finite data, and the universe of knowledge is infinite.
==========
Pinker)
19:03:59
When we put aside fantasies like foom, digital megalomania, instant omniscience,
and perfect control of every molecule in the universe, artificial intelligence is
like any other technology.
==========
Pinker)
19:04:06
It is developed incrementally, designed to satisfy multiple conditions, tested

before it is implemented, and constantly tweaked for efficacy and safety
==========
Pinker)
19:04:47
The observation of a 1965 report from NASA still holds: “Man is the lowest-cost,
150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by
unskilled labor.”
==========
Pinker)
19:06:15
Sometimes they are intended to get people to take security vulnerabilities more
seriously, under the theory (which we will encounter again in this chapter) that
the most effective way to mobilize people into adopting responsible policies is to
scare the living daylights out of them.
==========
Pinker)
19:08:31
“The more powerful technologies become, the more socially embedded they become.”
==========
Pinker)
19:09:52
is extremely hard to do, and the smaller the rogue team, the harder. The larger the
team, the more societal influences.
==========
Pinker)
19:11:19
Despite all the terror generated by terrorism, there must be very few individuals
out there waiting for an opportunity to wreak wanton destruction.
==========
Pinker)
19:12:44
Terrorism is a demonstrably ineffective tactic, and a mind that delights in

senseless mayhem for its own sake is probably not the brightest bulb in the box.
==========
Pinker)
19:14:42
Nonetheless, American military officials have warned of a “digital Pearl Harbor”

and a “Cyber-Armageddon” in which foreign states or sophisticated terrorist
organizations would hack into American sites to crash planes, open floodgates, melt
down nuclear power plants, black out power grids, and take down the financial
system. Most cybersecurity experts consider the threats to be inflated—a pretext
for more military funding, power, and restrictions on Internet privacy and freedom.
==========
Pinker)
19:17:14
One reason that the death toll of World War II was so horrendous is that war
planners on both sides adopted the strategy of bombing civilians until their
societies collapsed—which they never did.
==========
Bringing Progress to Paradise (Jeff Rasley)
16:20:13
My purpose has not been to alleviate poverty. Poverty is a relative term, and lack
of material wealth by American standards is not in itself a misfortune.
==========
16:21:22
That is why stories such as that told in James Cameron's film Avatar are so
compelling. We identify with the poor “primitives” instead of the rich “civilized.”
==========
16:25:18
“the ecstasy of the surrender to nature.”

==========
14:06:23
Tourism in the Khumbu has affected Sherpa culture by turning many Sherpas from yak
herders to lodge owners, or to guides, cooks, or porters working for expeditions.
==========
16:30:00
did not want to stew in my ambivalence about the impact of Western consumerism on
Himalayan villagers.
==========
16:31:34
Jacques Lacan and other postmodern philosophers make the point that anomie and
alienation are increased by consumerism; I am what I consume, and nothing more.
==========
16:32:03
It is perfectly understandable that Ang Temba wanted the benefit of piped water to
his family's house. But what was lost to the community by families no longer
gathering at the nearest river to fill their water buckets?
==========
16:38:34
Within forty years of the first summit, the basis of the Sherpa economy along the
Base Camp Trail had been transformed from yak herding to tourism. The hillbillies
of Nepal became the nouveau riche.
==========
16:39:35
A friend, who is a schoolmaster in Sikkim and has worked to preserve traditional

Buddhist practices and culture in Sikkim, calls the Sherpas of the Khumbu “whores.”
==========
17:00:15
I asked what Tenzing had done for the Sherpas, and he responded that Tenzing
“helped the world to know Sherpa culture. We were only known as ‘people from the
east.’ Norgay made us Sherpa and known to the world.”
==========
17:07:54
Gyalzen related how the people from Namche followed “the white people” all the way
to base camp just because the locals were so curious about these people with white
hair (blonds) and who drank water from bottles. “They thought these people were
very special and had special things. Some people followed the ‘tourists’ just to
look at them.”
==========
17:09:27
He was correct about the benefits of tourism for the Sherpas and that most Sherpas
are still very strong and friendly, but there are now obese Sherpas who sit in
shops and collect money; Sherpas who no longer look at white people with great
curiosity but merely as a means for more revenue; and Sherpas who have grown up not
learning the traditional songs, dances, and language.
==========
17:09:38
The insidious power of consumerism has a leveling effect on all cultures. It

demands uniformity.
==========
17:10:43
Hiking to Khumjung the next day, we passed by the Everest View Hotel at
Shyangboche. The hotel was built with its own helipad (the only private helipad in
the Khumbu) in the early 1990s by Japanese entrepreneurs. The plan was that rich
Japanese tourists would chopper up to a modern hotel with a view of Mount Everest
without having to hike from Lukla. The story goes that all the guests in the first
few groups to stay at the hotel became violently ill with altitude sickness because
they flew from Katmandu at 5,000 feet to 12,500 feet without any time to
acclimatize. The owners went bankrupt and all the locals lost their jobs. The
restaurant at the hotel reopened a couple of years later, but the grand but empty
hotel stands as a symbol of the unfulfilled promise of never-ending economic
development for the Khumbu Sherpas.
==========
19:05:45
Ethnologists claim the Rai migrated from Burma to Solu-Khumbu in ancient times,
although their physiognomy looks Mongol (which to my eyes, interestingly, resembles
the Mayan people of the Yucatan).
==========
19:06:02
Rai were among the Nepalese hill tribes that defeated the Brits in 1812, when they
first attempted to invade Nepal.
==========
19:08:51
A guru gains renown in Buddhist-Hindu culture through promoting the message of

peace and love and encouraging followers to greater spiritual enlightenment.
==========
19:08:59
In the 1960s and into the 1990s, Nepal was a beacon of peace in the sense that
Hindus, Buddhists, Moslems, Christians, and all the different ethnic groups lived
in peace.
==========
19:12:44
Just before my first visit to Nepal in 1995, a Nepalese guy killed a European in a
bar fight in Katmandu. The entire nation was in mourning when we arrived because of
the felt national disgrace and sorrow over a guest of Nepal being killed. In the
ten-year civil war, from 1996 to 2006, an estimated 12,800 Nepalis died. I found it
unbelievable that the Maoists and the government could have brought such a degree
of fear, death, and destruction to a nation that mourned so soulfully over the
death of one person two years before the war began.
==========
19:18:03
But I didn't really believe that he would just return to the life of his ancestors.
The power of a money-based and consumeroriented economy is too seductive. I doubted
he could simply let go of it. More likely, he would fight and scrabble to find a
way to hang on to the gains in creature comfort that tourism had brought to his
family.
==========
23:30:35
It seemed as though he expected Nepalese to conform to his standards, rather than

being curious to learn about their ways.
==========
12:03:48
Roadside villages in the Himalayan foothills, as in most Third World countries, are
a collection of poor people trying to eke out a living connected in some way with
the commerce passing on the highway. Many have left nearby farms.
==========
12:04:03
These pretty little farms mediate the contrast between the ugliness of human
poverty inside the village and the beauty of nature's hills and valleys.
==========
Pinker)
11:51:29
If India and Pakistan went to war and detonated a hundred of their weapons, twenty
million people could be killed right away, and soot from the firestorms could
spread through the atmosphere, devastate the ozone layer, and cool the planet for
more than a decade, which in turn would slash food production and starve more than
a billion people.
==========
Pinker)
11:51:39
An all-out exchange between the United States and Russia could cool the Earth by
8°C for years and create a nuclear winter (or at least autumn) that would starve
even more.
==========
Pinker)
11:52:29
Once life originates on a planet, it inevitably progresses to intelligence,

civilization, science, nuclear physics, nuclear weapons, and suicidal war,
exterminating itself before it can leave its solar system.
==========
Pinker)
11:53:24
The movement continues among high-profile scientists today, including Stephen

Hawking, Michio Kaku, Lawrence Krauss, and Max Tegmark.
==========
Pinker)
11:55:47
One day—and it is hard to believe that it will not be soon—we will make our choice.
Either we will sink into the final coma and end it all or, as I trust and believe,
we will awaken to the truth of our peril . . . and rise up to cleanse the earth of
nuclear weapons.
==========
Pinker)
11:58:51
Paul Boyer found that nuclear alarmism actually encouraged the arms race by scaring
the nation into pursuing more and bigger bombs, the better to deter the Soviets.
==========
Pinker)
11:59:27
The fundamental fact of the nuclear age is that no atomic weapon has been used
since Nagasaki.
==========
Pinker)
11:59:33
If the hands of a clock point to a few minutes to midnight for seventy-two years,
something is wrong with the clock.
==========
Pinker)
12:05:15
Nuclear weapons technology is not the culmination of the ascent of human mastery
over the forces of nature. It is a mess we blundered into because of vicissitudes
of history and that we now must figure out how to extricate ourselves from.
==========
Pinker)
12:05:41
“My generation saw the war against Hitler as a war of good against evil; any able-
bodied young man could stomach the shame of civilian clothes only from an inner
conviction that what he was doing instead would contribute even more to ultimate
victory.”
==========
Pinker)
12:06:36
Most historians today believe that Japan surrendered not because of the atomic
bombings, whose devastation was no greater than that from the firebombings of sixty
other Japanese cities, but because of the entry into the Pacific war of the Soviet
Union, which threatened harsher terms of surrender.
==========
Pinker)
14:02:29
But that is the official policy of the United States, the United Kingdom, France,
Russia, and Pakistan, all of whom have declared they might launch a nuclear weapon
if they or their allies have been massively attacked with non-nuclear weapons.
==========
Pinker)
14:03:00
Nuclear weapon states could all agree to No First Use in a treaty; they could get
there by GRIT (with incremental commitments like never attacking civilian targets,
never attacking a non-nuclear state, and never attacking a target that could be
destroyed by conventional means); or they could simply adopt it unilaterally, which
is in their own interests.
==========
Pinker)
14:06:53
most times and places, homicides kill far more people than wars, and homicide rates
have been falling as well.
==========
Pinker)
14:07:06
more countries have policies that favor their minorities than policies that
discriminate
==========
Pinker)
14:07:43
Life in other rich countries is even safer, and life in poorer countries will get
safer as they get richer.
==========
Pinker)
14:08:37
Early in the 19th century, 12 percent of the world

==========
Pinker)
14:08:43
Early in the 19th century, 12 percent of the world could read and write; today 83
percent can. Literacy and the education it enables will soon be universal, for
girls as well as boys.
==========
Pinker)
14:11:17
Lawmakers have made people better off by discouraging acts that are individually
beneficial but collectively harmful. Diplomats have done the same with nations.
Scholars have perpetuated the treasury of knowledge and augmented the power of
reason. Artists have expanded the circle of sympathy. Activists have pressured the
powerful to overturn repressive measures, and their fellow citizens to change
repressive norms. All these efforts have been channeled into institutions that have
allowed us to circumvent the flaws of human nature and empower our better angels.
==========
Pinker)
14:25:43
Some economists, like Robert Gordon in his 2016 The Rise and Fall of American
Growth, point to demographic and macroeconomic headwinds, such as fewer working
people supporting more retirees, a leveling off in the expansion of education, a
rise in government debt, and the increase in inequality (which depresses demand for
goods and services, because richer people spend less of their incomes than poorer
people).11 Gordon adds that the most transformative inventions may already have
been invented. The first half of the 20th century revolutionized the home with
electricity, water, sewerage, telephones, and motorized appliances. Since then
homes haven’t changed nearly as much. An electronic bidet with a heated seat is
nice, but it’s not like going from an outhouse to a flush toilet.
==========
Pinker)
14:25:53
Another explanation is cultural: America has lost its mojo.12 Workers in depressed
regions no longer pick up and move to vibrant ones but collect disability insurance
and drop out of the labor force.
==========
Pinker)
14:25:59
Ambitious young people want to be artists and professionals, not entrepreneurs.

Investors and the government no longer back moonshots. As the entrepreneur Peter
Thiel lamented, “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.”
==========
Pinker)
14:27:15
Global education could be transformed. The world’s knowledge has already been made
available in encyclopedias, lectures, exercises, and datasets to the billions of
people with a smartphone. Individualized instruction can be provided over the Web
to children in the developing world by volunteers (the “Granny Cloud”) and to
learners anywhere by artificially intelligent tutors.
==========
Pinker)
14:28:03
problems. A third is the economic empowerment of billions of people through

smartphones, online education, and microfinancing.
==========
Pinker)
14:28:22
Will the Second Machine Age kick economies out of their stagnation? It’s not
certain, because economic growth depends not just on the available technology but
on how well a nation’s financial and human capital are deployed to use it.
==========
Pinker)
14:29:14
Joel Mokyr notes that “aggregate statistics like GDP per capita and its derivatives
such as factor productivity . . . were designed for a steel-and-wheat economy, not
one in which information and data are the most dynamic sector. Many of the new
goods and services are expensive to design, but once they work, they can be copied
at very low or zero costs.
==========
Pinker)
14:30:17
Human welfare has parted company from GDP in a second way. As modern societies
become more humanistic, they devote more of their wealth to forms of human
betterment that are not priced in the marketplace.
==========
Pinker)
14:32:03
Authoritarian populism can be seen as a pushback of elements of human nature—

tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, zero-sum thinking—against the
Enlightenment institutions that were designed to circumvent them. By focusing on
the tribe rather than the individual, it has no place for the protection of
minority rights or the promotion of human welfare worldwide. By failing to
acknowledge that hard-won knowledge is the key to societal improvement, it
denigrates “elites” and “experts” and downplays the marketplace of ideas, including
freedom of speech, diversity of opinion, and the fact-checking of self-serving
claims.
==========
Pinker)
14:34:32
Trump is a protectionist who sees international trade as a zero-sum contest
==========
Pinker)
14:34:43
Trump is a protectionist who sees international trade as a zero-sum contest between

countries, and is committed to tearing up international trade agreements.
==========
Pinker)
14:35:50
While Trump has cultivated a reputation for law and order, he is viscerally
uninterested in evidence-based policy that would distinguish effective crime-
prevention measures from useless tough talk. The postwar
==========
Pinker)
14:35:55
While Trump has cultivated a reputation for law and order, he is viscerally
uninterested in evidence-based policy that would distinguish effective crime-
prevention measures from useless tough talk.
==========
Pinker)
14:41:56
As for the battle against truth and fact, over the long run they have a built-in
advantage: when you stop believing in them, they don’t go away.
==========
Pinker)
14:43:02
Trump entered office with a rating of 40 percent, the lowest ever for an incoming
president, and during his first seven months it sank to 34 percent, barely more
than half of the average rating of the nine previous presidents at the same point
in their terms.31
==========
Pinker)
14:44:20
Beneficial historical developments often create losers together with the winners,
and the apparent economic losers of globalization (namely the lower classes of rich
countries) are often said to be the supporters of authoritarian populism.
==========
Pinker)
14:44:53
Clinton 52–42, as did those who identified “the economy” as the most important
issue. A majority of voters in the four highest income brackets voted for Trump,
and Trump voters singled out “immigration” and “terrorism,” not “the economy,” as
the most important issues.34 The twisted metal has turned up more promising clues.
==========
Pinker)
14:45:07
Clinton 52–42, as did those who identified “the economy” as the most important
issue. A majority of voters in the four highest income brackets voted for Trump,
and Trump voters singled out “immigration” and “terrorism,” not “the economy,” as
the most important issues.34
==========
Pinker)
14:45:32
A more interesting explanation is that education exposes people in young adulthood

to other races and cultures in a way that makes it harder to demonize them. Most
interesting of all is the likelihood that education, when it does what it is
supposed to do, instills a respect for vetted fact and reasoned argument, and so
inoculates people against conspiracy theories, reasoning by anecdote, and emotional
demagoguery.
==========
Pinker)
14:46:05
But it did align with the map of Google searches for the word nigger, which Seth
Stephens-Davidowitz has shown is a reliable indicator of racism (chapter 15).36
==========
Pinker)
14:47:08
Support for populist parties is strongest not from manual workers but from the
“petty bourgeoisie” (self-employed tradesmen and the owners of small businesses),
followed by foremen and technicians. Populist voters are older, more religious,
more rural, less educated, and more likely to be male and members of the ethnic
majority.
==========
Pinker)
14:47:52
educated, and in the ethnic majority “feel that they have become strangers from the
predominant values in their own country, left behind by progressive tides of
cultural change that they do not share. . . . The silent revolution launched in the
1970s seems to have spawned a resentful counter-revolutionary backlash today.”
==========
Pinker)
14:51:01
As we saw in chapter 15, people carry their emancipative values with them as they
age rather than sliding into illiberalism. And a recent analysis of 20th-century
American voters by the political scientists Yair Ghitza and Andrew Gelman has shown
that Americans do not consistently vote for more conservative presidents as they
age. Their voting preferences are shaped by their cumulative experience of the
popularity of presidents over their life spans, with a peak of influence in the 14–
24-year-old window.46 The young voters who reject populism today are unlikely to
embrace it tomorrow.
==========
Pinker)
14:52:12
As has been said about science, sometimes society advances funeral by funeral.
==========
Pinker)
14:53:48
If the media and intellectuals instead put events into statistical and historical
context, they could help answer that question. Radical regimes from Nazi Germany
and Maoist China to contemporary Venezuela and Turkey show that people have a
tremendous amount to lose when charismatic authoritarians responding to a “crisis”
trample over democratic norms and institutions and command their countries by the
force of their personalities.
==========
Pinker)
14:56:17
Kelly offers “protopia,” the pro- from progress and process. Others have suggested
“pessimistic hopefulness,” “opti-realism,” and “radical incrementalism.”
==========
Pinker)
14:56:25
My favorite comes from Hans Rosling, who, when asked whether he was an optimist,
replied, “I am not an optimist. I’m a very serious possibilist.”
==========
23:12:24
My soul sang. I would be enveloped by the gigantic night sky filled with stars so
luminous and seemingly close enough to touch that a headlamp isn't needed to walk
around camp at night. I would hear throughout the day and night the muted sound of
a glacier-fed river rushing through the deep valley it cut into the great humped
foothills. I would see in the distance the majestic peaks of the High Himalayas
guarding the border with Tibet. I would be awakened in the morning by the gentle
voice of a loyal kitchen boy bringing milk tea to my tent and then the humming of
the cook in his kitchen as the powerful scent of a hot breakfast wafted through the
campsite.
==========
23:12:35
My days would be filled with the glorious feeling of my legs powering up and down
steep rocky trails while my lungs and heart pumped life through my body. These are
the selfish reasons I keep coming back to the Himalayas.
==========
00:43:15
The American capitalist devotes himself to changing the environment to satisfy his
desires. The Tibetan Buddhist devotes herself to adapting to the environment to
enjoy
==========
00:43:21
enjoy it. Bill
==========
00:43:27
enjoy it. Bill
==========
00:43:33
enjoy it.
==========
10:38:52
But I know what it is like to have to keep moving down the trail when it would feel
so much better to stop and hire a pack animal or porter to carry you out, or to
contract for a helicopter evacuation. I don't think David seriously considered
those possibilities, although he may have fantasized about being flown out.
Instead, he became more like my description of what is so attractive about the
people of the High Himalayas; he became stronger and gentler.
==========
10:40:03
We are not to accept pain or discomfort; rather, we are encouraged to seek

immediate relief.
==========
15:17:02
The only teaching materials were chalkboards with no erasers and handmade posters;
no books or tablets. There were a few rough benches for students to sit on; no
desks or chairs. It pulled at my heartstrings to see such beautiful and eager
children and to imagine what their classes must be like without any teaching
materials or supplies other than the enthusiasm of their teachers and rudimentary
posters hung by string on the patched walls of the little classroom.
==========
15:18:15
For the moment, I knew exactly why the hell we were here in Nepal. To receive the
love of this village and to give of our material wealth so these children would
have better lives.
==========
16:43:46
Niru helped to support two hundred people in the Basa area. So, in my mind, he must
be considered the Godfather of Basa.
==========
16:45:18
Like the Sherpas, Rai are matriarchal. In the homes with grandmothers, the
grandmother was in charge of initially welcoming us and offering food.
==========
16:48:07
home we visited was a working farmstead. I found it interesting and charming that
every home has a flower garden. These folks are subsistence farm families, yet they
have a deep appreciation of beauty.
==========
16:48:12
found it interesting and charming that every home has a flower garden. These folks
are subsistence farm families, yet they have a deep appreciation of beauty.
==========
16:48:20
I found it interesting and charming that every home has a flower garden. These
folks are subsistence farm families, yet they have a deep appreciation of beauty.
==========
17:34:31
It seemed to me that there is such a high level of emotional security in the
community that villagers expressed openly and unhesitatingly their feelings about
our departure—sadness. It was an intensely bittersweet parting.
==========
17:35:17
The emotional honesty of the villagers was so powerfully affecting. To experience

such warmth and sweetness from an entire community—little tykes, village elders and
matriarchs, and across all of the castes—has had a powerful and lasting effect on
the three of
==========
17:39:14
I felt like a lone voice crying in the wilderness. My Nepalese friends do not see
the possibility, to me the inevitability, of the domino effect of introducing the
modern world into the delicate balance of a harmonious Himalayan village culture.
==========
18:12:11
There was more to give, and more to receive.

==========
18:13:58
After a week in the mountains and small villages, driving through Katmandu was a
shock to our mellowed-out consciousness. But, I suppose, it was a necessary
==========
18:14:04
After a week in the mountains and small villages, driving through Katmandu was a
shock to our mellowed-out consciousness.
==========
18:21:29
To deny Basa electricity in order to preserve it as a “museum,” Carl argued, would

be another form of Western paternalism.
==========
18:26:16
Basa does not have the means to make improvements to its infrastructure, such as
developing electricity and providing computers for the school. It does have people
with tremendous strength and self-sufficiency. And the Basa villagers have been
quite willing to do all the work themselves to build and renovate the school
building, as well as to provide trained teachers from its own people.
==========
18:26:22
The challenge is to partner without fostering dependence.

==========
18:26:56
Ganesh said that the real problem for Basa was that the farms of many of the
families were not big enough to provide food for the family for the entire year.
==========
18:27:47
a) help the local economy immediately through jobs with Adventure GeoTreks and help
raise funds for improvements to the village requested by the village and to be
carried out by the village; and b) introduce friends to Basa so they would benefit
from learning about the Rai way of life.
==========
18:27:55
The answer is not to make Himalayan mountain people more like Westerners. The
answer is: to share.
==========
Pinker)
20:54:19
There’s the postmodernist credo that reason is a pretext to exert power, reality is
socially constructed, and all statements are trapped in a web of self-reference and
collapse into paradox.
==========
Pinker)
20:55:35
the claim that it is objectively false. There

==========
Pinker)
20:55:52
The claim “Everything is subjective” must be nonsense, for it would itself have to
be either subjective or objective. But it can’t be objective, since in that case it
would be false if true. And it can’t be subjective, because then it would not rule
out any objective claim, including the claim that it is objectively false. There
may be some subjectivists, perhaps styling themselves as pragmatists, who present
subjectivism as applying even to itself. But then it does not call for a reply,
since it is just a report of what the subjectivist finds it agreeable to say. If he
also invites us to join him, we need not offer any reason for declining, since he
has offered us no reason to accept.2
==========
Pinker)
20:56:09
whether one exists demonstrates that one exists, the very fact that one is
appealing to reasons demonstrates that reason exists.
==========
Pinker)
20:57:49
As soon as they do, they have committed themselves to reason—and the listeners they
are trying to convince can hold their feet to the fire of coherence and accuracy.
==========
Pinker)
20:58:33
But as important as these discoveries are, it’s a mistake to see them as refuting
some Enlightenment tenet that humans are rational actors, or as licensing the
fatalistic conclusion that we might as well give up on reasoned persuasion and
fight demagoguery with demagoguery.
==========
Pinker)
20:59:04
What they argued was that we ought to be rational, by learning to repress the
fallacies and dogmas that so readily seduce us, and that we can be rational,
collectively if not individually, by implementing institutions and adhering to
norms that constrain our faculties, including free speech, logical analysis, and
empirical testing. And if you disagree, then why should we accept your claim that
humans are incapable of rationality?
==========
Pinker)
21:02:51
The 21st century, an age of unprecedented access to knowledge, has also seen
maelstroms of irrationality, including the denial of evolution, vaccine safety, and
anthropogenic climate change, and the promulgation of conspiracy theories, from
9/11 to the size of Donald Trump’s popular vote.
==========
Pinker)
21:05:08
Professing a belief in evolution is not a gift of scientific literacy, but an

affirmation of loyalty to a liberal secular subculture as opposed to a conservative
religious
==========
Pinker)
21:05:13
Professing a belief in evolution is not a gift of scientific literacy, but an

affirmation of loyalty to a liberal secular subculture as opposed to a conservative
religious one.
==========
Pinker)
21:07:25
In a revolutionary analysis of reason in the public sphere, the legal scholar Dan
Kahan has argued that certain beliefs become symbols of cultural allegiance. People
affirm or deny these beliefs to express not what they know but who they are.15 We
all identify with particular tribes or subcultures, each of which embraces a creed
on what makes for a good life and how society should run its affairs.
==========
Pinker)
21:09:16
To express the wrong opinion on a politicized issue can make one an oddball at best
—someone who “doesn’t get it”—and a traitor at worst.
==========
Pinker)
21:10:05
Kahan concludes that we are all actors in a Tragedy of the Belief Commons: what’s
rational for every individual to believe (based on esteem) can be irrational for
the society as a whole to act upon (based on reality).17 The perverse incentives
behind “expressive rationality” or “identity-protective cognition” help explain the
paradox of 21st-century irrationality.
==========
Pinker)
21:10:10
Kahan concludes that we are all actors in a Tragedy of the Belief Commons: what’s
rational for every individual to believe (based on esteem) can be irrational for
the society as a whole to act upon (based on reality).
==========
Pinker)
21:10:23
The perverse incentives behind “expressive rationality” or “identity-protective

cognition” help explain the paradox of 21st-century irrationality.
==========
Pinker)
21:11:38
What’s going on?”18 What’s going on is that these people are sharing blue lies. A
white lie is told for the benefit of the hearer; a blue lie is told for the benefit
of an in-group (originally, fellow police officers).19 While some of the conspiracy
theorists may be genuinely misinformed, most express these beliefs for the purpose
of performance rather than truth: they are trying to antagonize liberals and
display solidarity with their blood brothers.
==========
Pinker)
21:12:28
Psychologists have long known that the human brain is infected with motivated
reasoning (directing an argument toward a favored conclusion, rather than following
it where it leads), biased evaluation (finding fault with evidence that disconfirms
a favored position and giving a pass to evidence that supports it), and a My-Side
bias (self-explanatory).
==========
Pinker)
21:14:12
Engagement with politics is like sports fandom in another way: people seek and
consume news to enhance the fan experience, not to make their opinions more
accurate.25
==========
Pinker)
21:14:38
the better informed a person is about climate change, the more polarized his or her
opinion.26
==========
Pinker)
21:20:12
They appear about equally stupid when faced with proper challenges to their
position.
==========
Pinker)
21:22:21
Industrial capitalism launched the Great Escape from universal poverty in the 19th
century and is rescuing the rest of humankind in a Great Convergence in the 21st.
==========
Pinker)
21:22:28
Over the same time span, communism brought the world terror-famines, purges,
gulags, genocides, Chernobyl, megadeath revolutionary wars, and North Korea–style
poverty before collapsing everywhere else of its own internal contradictions.
==========
Pinker)
21:24:25
Friedrich Hayek’s argument in The Road to Serfdom that regulation and welfare lay
out a slippery slope along which a country will slide into penury and tyranny.
==========
Pinker)
21:26:36
Burkean conservatism). Reason tells us that political deliberation would be most

fruitful if it treated governance more like scientific experimentation and less
like an extreme-sports competition.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 509 | location 7799-7800 | Added on Tuesday, 3 July 2018
14:52:40
Malthusian economics has ever since been derided, along with the Luddites, as
backward looking and ignorant of the nature of modern technology.
==========
14:55:47
is entirely possible that the first 150 years of the Industrial Revolution captured
what Tyler Cowen calls the “low-hanging fruit” of productivity advance, and that
while future innovations will continue, the rate at which they improve human
welfare will fall.
==========
Pinker)
18:12:22
Committed to their conclusions, they were reluctant to change their minds even when
their predictions clearly failed. They would tell us, “Just wait.”
==========
Pinker)
18:12:27
Committed to their conclusions, they were reluctant to change their minds even when
their predictions clearly failed. They would tell us, “Just wait.”
==========
Pinker)
18:13:06
Tetlock’s superforecasters were: pragmatic experts who drew on many analytical

tools, with the choice of tool hinging on the particular problem they faced. These
experts gathered as much information from as many sources as they could. When
thinking, they often shifted mental gears, sprinkling their speech with transition
markers such as “however,” “but,” “although,” and “on the other hand.” They talked
about possibilities and probabilities, not certainties. And while no one likes to
say “I was wrong,” these experts more readily admitted it and changed their minds.
==========
Pinker)
18:18:43
“When the audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of
contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to
the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials.”
==========
Pinker)
18:24:49
Professors are pressured to avoid lecturing on upsetting topics, and have been
subjected to Stalinesque investigations for politically incorrect opinions.66 Often
the repression veers into unintended comedy.67 A guideline for deans on how to
identify “microaggressions” lists remarks such as “America is the land of
opportunity” and “I believe
==========
Pinker)
18:27:04
Intellectual and political polarization feed each other. It’s harder to be a

conservative intellectual when American conservative politics has become steadily
more know-nothing, from Ronald Reagan to Dan Quayle to George W. Bush to Sarah
Palin to Donald Trump.
==========
Pinker)
18:27:21
A challenge of our era is how to foster an intellectual and political culture that
is driven by reason rather than tribalism and mutual reaction.
==========
Pinker)
18:33:09
The tipping point depends on the balance between how badly the opinion
==========
Pinker)
18:33:20
The tipping point depends on the balance between how badly the opinion holder’s
reputation would be damaged by relinquishing the opinion and whether the
counterevidence is so blatant and public as to be common knowledge: a naked
emperor, an elephant in the room.81 As we saw in chapter 10, that is starting to
happen with public opinion on climate change.
==========
Pinker)
18:34:57
The reasons are familiar to education researchers.84 Any curriculum will be

pedagogically ineffective if it consists of a lecturer yammering in front of a
blackboard, or a textbook that students highlight with a yellow marker. People
understand concepts only when they are forced to think them through, to discuss
them with others, and to use them to solve problems. A second impediment to
effective teaching is that pupils don’t spontaneously transfer what they learned
from one concrete example to others in the same abstract category.
==========
Pinker)
18:37:55
groupmates, and the truth usually wins.89 Scientists themselves have hit upon a new
strategy called adversarial collaboration, in which mortal enemies work together to
get to the bottom of an issue, setting up empirical tests that they agree
beforehand will settle
==========
Pinker)
18:38:47
“Contrary to common bleak assessments of human reasoning abilities, people are

quite capable of reasoning in an unbiased manner, at least when they are evaluating
arguments rather than producing them, and when they are after the truth rather than
trying to win a debate.”
==========
Pinker)
18:39:23
The chapters on progress have shown that our collective ingenuity has been
increasingly successful in solving society’s problems.
==========
Pinker)
18:42:00
As a result, reforms that are designed to make governance more “democratic,” such
as plebiscites and direct primaries, may instead have made governance more
identity-driven and irrational.
==========
Pinker)
18:44:09
Several climate activists have lamented that by writing and starring in the
documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore may have done the movement more harm
than good, because as a former Democratic vice-president and presidential nominee
he stamped climate change with a left-wing seal. (It’s hard to believe today, but
environmentalism was once denounced as a right-wing cause, in which the gentry
frivolously worried about habitats for duck-hunting and the views from their
country estates rather than serious issues like racism, poverty, and Vietnam.)
==========
Pinker)
18:45:32
“Does gun control reduce crime?” or “Does a minimum wage increase unemployment?”
with “Wait, let me look up the latest meta-analysis” rather than with a patellar
reflex predictable from their politics?
==========
Pinker)
16:20:19
We could crow about historic triumphs in human rights, such as the abolition of
slavery and the defeat of fascism. But however inspiring these victories are, they
consist in the removal of obstacles we set in our own path. It would be like
listing in the achievements section of a résumé that you overcame a heroin
addiction.
==========
Pinker)
16:29:59
most erudite members of the clerisy.

==========
Pinker)
16:32:26
Its signature practices, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind
methods, are designed to circumvent the sins to which scientists, being human, are
vulnerable. As Richard Feynman put it, the first principle of science is “that you
must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
==========
Pinker)
16:33:51
The same is true of the common argument that the claims of science are
untrustworthy because the scientists of some earlier period were motivated by the
prejudices and chauvinisms of the day.
==========
Pinker)
16:33:56
When they were, they were doing bad science, and it’s only the better science of
later periods that allows us, today, to identify their errors.
==========
Pinker)
16:34:56
Science is not a list of empirical facts. Scientists are immersed in the ethereal
medium of information, including the truths of mathematics, the logic of their
theories, and the values that guide their enterprise. Nor, for its part, has
philosophy ever confined itself to a ghostly realm of pure ideas that float free of
the physical universe.
==========
Pinker)
16:46:18
“the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.”

==========
Pinker)
16:46:28
Michel Foucault, who argued that the Holocaust was the inevitable culmination of a
“bio-politics” that began with the Enlightenment, when science and rational
governance exerted increasing power over people’s lives.27 In a similar vein, the
sociologist Zygmunt Bauman blamed the Holocaust on the Enlightenment ideal to
“remake the society, force it to conform to an overall, scientifically conceived
plan.”
==========
Pinker)
16:48:58
Everything went downhill when the Aryans interbred with inferior conquered peoples,
diluting their greatness and causing them to degenerate into the effete, decadent,
soulless, bourgeois, commercial cultures that the Romantics were always whinging
about.
==========
Pinker)
16:49:40
Hitler rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution, particularly the idea that all humans
had gradually evolved from apes, which was incompatible with their Romantic theory
of race and with the older folk and religious notions from which it emerged.
==========
Pinker)
16:52:03
Many countries forcibly sterilized delinquents, the mentally retarded, the mentally
ill, and other people who fell into a wide net of ailments and stigmas. Nazi
Germany modeled its forced sterilization laws after ones in Scandinavia and the
United States, and its mass murder of Jews, Roma, and homosexuals is often
considered a logical extension of negative eugenics.
==========
Pinker)
17:12:42
The dataphobic mindset (“It’s not like that in Burkina Faso”) can lead to real
tragedy. Many political commentators can recall a failure of peacekeeping forces
(such as in Bosnia in 1995) and conclude that they are a waste of money and
manpower. But when a peacekeeping force is successful, nothing photogenic happens,
and it fails to make the news. In her book Does Peacekeeping Work? the political
scientist Virginia Page Fortna addressed the question in her title with the methods
of science rather than headlines, and, in defiance of Betteridge’s Law, found that
the answer is “a clear and resounding yes.” Other studies have come to the same
conclusion.48 Knowing the results of these analyses could make the difference
between an international organization helping to bring peace to a country and
letting it fester in civil war.
==========
Pinker)
17:12:57
Do multiethnic regions harbor “ancient hatreds” that can only be tamed by

partitioning them into ethnic enclaves and cleansing the minorities from each one?
Whenever ethnic neighbors go for each other’s throats we read about it, but what
about the neighborhoods that never make the news because they live in boring peace?
What proportion of pairs of ethnic neighbors coexist without violence? The answer
is, most of them: 95 percent of the neighbors in the former Soviet Union, 99
percent of those in Africa.
==========
Pinker)
17:13:11
Many people believe that Gandhi and Martin Luther King just got lucky: their
movements tugged at the heartstrings of enlightened democracies at opportune
moments, but everywhere else, oppressed people need violence to get out from under
a dictator’s boot.
==========
Pinker)
12:51:27
humankind to flourish in the same way that each of us seeks to flourish. The goal
of maximizing human flourishing—life,
==========
Pinker)
12:52:55
Life’s fulfillment emerges from individual participation in the service of humane

ideals. We . . . animate our lives with a deep sense of purpose, finding wonder and
awe in the joys and beauties of human existence, its challenges and tragedies, and
even in the inevitability and finality of death. . . .
==========
Pinker)
12:53:48
They came to the fore during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, leading to
the English, French, and American statements of rights, and got a second wind after
World War II, inspiring the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, and other institutions of global cooperation.4 Though humanism does not
invoke gods, spirits, or souls to ground meaning and morality, it is by no means
incompatible with religious institutions.
==========
Pinker)
12:53:56
Some Eastern religions, including Confucianism and varieties of Buddhism, always

grounded their ethics in human welfare rather than divine dictates.
==========
Pinker)
12:55:31
(The Silver Rule is “Don’t do to others what you don’t want done to yourself”; the
Platinum Rule, “Do to others what they would have you do to them.”
==========
Pinker)
12:55:42
(The Silver Rule is “Don’t do to others what you don’t want done to yourself”; the
Platinum Rule, “Do to others what they would have you do to them.” They are
designed to anticipate masochists, suicide bombers, differences in taste, and other
sticking points for the Golden Rule.)
==========
Pinker)
12:57:39
Since intelligence is not a wonder algorithm but is fed by knowledge, they must be
driven to sop up information about the world and to be attentive to its nonrandom
patterning.
==========
Pinker)
13:00:18
As the psychologist Peter DeScioli points out, when you face an adversary alone,
your best weapon may be an ax, but when you face an adversary in front of a throng
of bystanders, your best weapon may be an argument.11 And he who engages in
argument may be defeated by a better one. Ultimately the moral universe includes
everyone who can think.
==========
Pinker)
13:01:18
With sympathy installed in our psychological makeup, it can be expanded by reason

and experience to encompass all sentient beings.13 A different philosophical
objection to humanism is that it’s “just utilitarianism”—that a morality based on
maximizing human flourishing is the same as a morality that seeks the greatest
happiness for the greatest number.14 (Philosophers often refer to happiness as
“utility.”)
==========
Pinker)
13:01:22
With sympathy installed in our psychological makeup, it can be expanded by reason

and experience to encompass all sentient beings.13
==========
Pinker)
13:02:43
the problems with deontological ethics. If lying is intrinsically wrong, must we

answer truthfully when the Gestapo demand to know the whereabouts of Anne Frank?
==========
Pinker)
13:03:02
If a terrorist has hidden a ticking nuclear bomb that would annihilate millions, is
it immoral to waterboard him into revealing its location? And given the absence of
a thundering voice from the heavens, who gets to pull principles out of the air and
pronounce that certain acts are inherently immoral even if they hurt no one?
==========
Pinker)
13:03:10
At various times moralists have used deontological thinking to insist that

vaccination, anesthesia, blood transfusions, life insurance, interracial marriage,
and homosexuality were wrong by their very nature.
==========
Pinker)
13:05:37
The philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist Joshua Greene has argued that many
deontological convictions are rooted in primitive intuitions of tribalism, purity,
revulsion, and social norms, whereas utilitarian conclusions emerge from rational
cogitation.
==========
Pinker)
13:05:55
Greene also argues that when people from diverse cultural backgrounds have to agree
upon a moral code, they tend to go utilitarian.
==========
Pinker)
13:06:00
That explains why certain reform movements, such as legal equality for women and
gay marriage, overturned centuries of precedent astonishingly quickly (chapter 15):
with nothing but custom and intuition behind it, the status quo crumbled in the
face of utilitarian arguments.
==========
The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx)
23:50:21
Communist society (wrongly, but I will come to that). Not only did I
==========
Why We Sleep (Matthew Walker)
23:59:06
why we do not dream in deep NREM sleep, nor do we keep explicit track of time),
this also allows the cortex to “relax” into its default mode of functioning. That
default mode is what we call deep slow-wave sleep.
==========
00:04:40
This feature, termed “atonia” (an absence of tone, referring here to the muscles),
is instigated by a powerful disabling signal that is transmitted down the full
length of your spinal cord from your brain stem. Once put in place, the postural
body muscles, such as the biceps of your arms and the quadriceps of your legs, lose
all tension and strength.
==========
00:05:22
Why did evolution decide to outlaw muscle activity during REM sleep? Because by
eliminating muscle activity you are prevented from acting out your dream
experience. During REM sleep, there is a nonstop barrage of motor commands swirling
around the brain, and they underlie the movement-rich experience of dreams.
==========
00:07:23
At first, scientists assumed that these rat-a-tat-tat eye movements corresponded to

the tracking of visual experience in dreams. This is not true. Instead, the eye
movements are intimately linked with the physiological creation of REM sleep, and
reflect something even more extraordinary than the passive apprehension
==========
00:07:29
At first, scientists assumed that these rat-a-tat-tat eye movements corresponded to

the tracking of visual experience in dreams. This is not true. Instead, the eye
movements are intimately linked with the physiological creation of REM sleep, and
reflect something even more extraordinary than the passive apprehension of moving
objects within dream space.
==========
18:40:13
conditions. The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour
of bourgeois property. The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition
of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern
bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system
of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the
exploitation of the many by the few.
==========
18:42:13
Expressed in somewhat different terms, they were stating the view that the history
of human social development is nothing less than the history of class struggle
between the haves and the have-nots.
==========
18:44:56
After years and years of laborious study, Marx answered in the affirmative: Yes,
the law of social development existed and that law was economic in nature; it had
to do with (1) who owned the means of production, (2) what kind of ownership
prevailed, and (3) what was the method of production.
==========
18:45:26
Human society develops along certain lines; it progresses in a certain

predetermined direction; it moves only one way, never going back, never regressing
to a previously attained stage. Human society starts out as tribal, in which the
means of production are collectively owned and the products of labor are equally
and collectively shared by the tribe; it then moves to the next stage, that of
slave-owning society, where the means of production—the slave and the land—are
privately owned by the slave owner. The next stage is feudal society, where the
principal owners (at times, the only owner) of everything are the king and the
nobility.
==========
18:45:43
Feudal society is followed by capitalism, where the means of production (the

factories, the land, the banks) are privately owned by the capitalist class. And so
it goes, from one stage to another, the movement typified by the method of
production (tribal, slave, feudal, capitalist) and by the type of ownership of the
means of production (collective, private), which is the central issue.
==========
18:46:26
However, said Marx, such a society can be created. The way to do that is to abolish
private ownership of the means of production (i.e., bourgeois private property) and
turn it into public, collective property; in a way, that would be akin to returning
to humankind's original state, but at a very different level of development, that
of capitalist industrialization.
==========
12:35:52
he insisted that the transition from one social stage to the next could happen only
when a given society had reached the limits of its development within a particular
stage.
==========
12:36:14
No society could skip a stage. This to Marx was an expression of historical logic.
It was akin to saying that one cannot become an adult without first passing through
adolescence.
==========
20:30:06
Although most people have become accustomed to the hyphenated expression Marxism-
Leninism, I find that combination both misleading and objectionable. Leninism has,
as a matter of fact, very little in common with Marxism.
==========
20:30:19
As the British historian Paul Johnson put it, Lenin “completely ignored the very
core of Marx's ideology, the historical determinism of the revolution” and believed
that “the decisive role was played by human will: his.” Lenin “developed” Marxist
theory by advancing the proposition that a proletarian revolution could occur in
what he called capitalism's weakest link; it was there that the “chain” would be
broken, that is, an economically backward country would turn out to be the most
advanced politically.
==========
20:39:18
short, socialism is a society where some have more, some have less, but there are
no have-nots, a system
==========
22:06:52
Marx believed that good results could be achieved only when society itself changed,
when ownership of the means of production would become collective. He may have been
an idealist in believing that once the conditions of human existence were changed,
once private ownership of property was abolished, once exploitation disappeared,
people would change as well. He believed that in a society where there were no
have-nots, where one's livelihood did not depend on struggling to make money, where
instead of competing against one another people worked together, in such a society
human nature would undergo serious changes.
==========
22:08:46
There were many things Marx did not foresee, among them, the ability of the
capitalist system to reform itself by incorporating a whole series of socialistic
elements—such as paid vacations, worker compensation, social security—measures
specifically designed to help the poor.
==========
22:11:43
However, let it be said that all of these measures and a host of others were never
a given, they were all the result of a continued struggle on the part of the
working people; blood was shed, many were killed, many more thrown in jail before
the ruling classes realized it was in their interest to grant these rights, that it
was either that or a revolt.
==========
22:16:34
One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class
cannot simply lay hold of the readymade State machinery, and wield it for its own
purposes.” (See The Civil War in France; Address of the General
==========
22:16:42
One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class
cannot simply lay hold of the readymade State machinery, and wield it for its own
purposes.”
==========
22:24:53
sleep is the state we must

==========
22:26:44
sleep is the state we must enter in order to fix that which has been upset by wake.
==========
00:22:39
The same is true for humans. Individuals who are deliberately fasting will sleep
less as the brain is tricked into thinking that food has suddenly become scarce.
==========
00:25:44
has found an ingenious way to obtain sleep. In-flight,

==========
00:25:55
In-flight, migrating birds will grab remarkably brief periods of sleep lasting only
seconds in duration. These ultra–power naps are just sufficient to avert the
ruinous brain and body deficits that would otherwise ensue from prolonged total
sleep deprivation.
==========
09:14:09
But it is REM sleep that takes these freshly minted memories and begins colliding
them with the entire back catalog of your life’s autobiography. These mnemonic
collisions during REM sleep spark new creative insights as novel links are forged
between unrelated pieces of information.
==========
22:25:13
Biologically, it is as if the day and night are far less light and dark,
respectively, for autistic individuals. As a consequence, there is a weaker signal
for when stable wake and solid sleep should take place.
==========
01:00:41
is not a complete redo of the network, and much of the original structure will
remain in place.
==========
20:10:22
First, wear sunglasses during morning exercise outdoors. This will reduce the
influence of morning light being sent to your suprachiasmatic clock that would
otherwise keep you on an early-to-rise schedule. Second, go back outside in the
late afternoon for sunlight exposure, but this time do not wear sunglasses. Make
sure to wear sun protection of some sort, such as a hat, but leave the sunglasses
at home. Plentiful later-afternoon daylight will help delay the evening release of
melatonin, helping push the timing of sleep to a later hour.
==========
20:25:50
The second benefit of sleep for memory comes after learning, one that effectively
clicks the “save” button on those newly created files. In doing so, sleep protects
newly acquired information, affording immunity against forgetting: an operation
called consolidation.
==========
Farrow)
09:41:31
for that. For one thing, there are fewer experienced

==========
Farrow)
09:41:41
For one thing, there are fewer experienced Foreign Service officers. And secondly,
one could argue that if you give an order to the Defense Department there’s an 80
percent chance it’ll be executed, if you give an order to the State Department
there’s an 80 percent chance of a discussion.”
==========
Farrow)
21:49:40
For one thing, there are fewer experienced Foreign Service officers. And secondly,
one could argue that if you give an order to the Defense Department there’s an 80
percent chance it’ll be executed, if you give an order to the State Department
there’s an 80 percent chance of a discussion.”
==========
19:03:22
Only stimulation during NREM sleep, in synchronous time with the brain’s own slow
mantra rhythm, leveraged a memory improvement.
==========
19:03:51
the auditory stimulation increased the power of the slow brainwaves and returned an
impressive 40 percent memory enhancement the next morning.
==========
21:07:53
When we tallied up the extra food items that participants wanted when they were
sleep-deprived, it amounted to an extra 600 calories.
==========
21:08:15
We found that a full night of sleep repairs the communication pathway between deep-
brain areas that unleash hedonic desires and higher-order brain regions whose job
it is to rein in these cravings.
==========
Farrow)
11:53:28
Dick Holbrooke was grasping, relentless, wore his ambition on his sleeve—the kind
of person who could go in a revolving door behind you and come out ahead of you,
one friend said.
==========
The King of Nepal (Joseph R. Pietri)
- Your Highlight on page 4 | location 52-53 | Added on Sunday, 5 August 2018
18:28:04
In 1973 Richard Nixon paid King Birendra “50 million dollars” to make hashish and
marijuana illegal.
==========
19:57:39
Kathmandu, a city where no opium is grown and no heroin is produced, became a huge
magnet for Burmese heroin, which came into Nepal overland through India, and
directly from Bangkok.
==========
22:30:11
In Muslim countries, hashish is made differently from that in India or Nepal. After
the plants are dried, the resin is shaken from the plant and filtered several times
until only a fine sticky powder remains. The powder is then beaten, which releases
the oils in the resin. Then, it is pressed into hashish. In Nepal and India they
hand rub the ganja tops during the hottest time of day. The black resin on the
workers’ hands is then rolled into balls. Both methods are extremely effective, but
the Muslim technique is cleaner. Hand rubbing results in more plant matter and
moisture, which can cause the hashish to mold.
==========
22:53:31
The title Chine Lama passed to his eldest son, Puntajawala.

==========
22:58:36
At the 1984 Olympic Games the entire Royal Nepalese soccer team was stopped by U.S.
Customs at LAX carrying the 150 kilos of heroin, and deported back to Nepal.
==========
22:59:04
Who would have thought that this heroin dealing Black Prince would one day be the
King of Nepal!
==========
22:59:26
Historically, the Thakalis have been the makers and suppliers of hashish in Nepal.
==========
23:17:17
The Nepali royal family had always operated the black market in Nepal. They had to
sacrifice someone, and that someone was D.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 121 | location 1854-1855 | Added on Thursday, 9 August
2018 12:07:32
But in Nepal’s case, there were no hardcore drug problems before its prohibition of
marijuana and hashish.
==========
Pinker)
2018 12:28:36
The first is theistic morality: the idea that morality consists in obeying the
dictates of a deity, which are enforced by supernatural reward and punishment in
this world or in an afterlife.
==========
Pinker)
2018 12:28:50
The second is romantic heroism: the idea that morality consists in the purity,
authenticity, and greatness of an individual or a nation.
==========
Pinker)
2018 19:30:25
The most obvious add-on is supernatural enforcement: the belief that if one commits
a sin, one will be smitten by God, damned to hell, or inscribed on the wrong page
of the Book of Life. It’s a tempting add-on because secular law enforcement cannot
possibly detect and punish every infraction, and everyone has a motive to convince
everyone else that they cannot get away with murder.
==========
Pinker)
2018 19:31:43
and what they demand of their devotees.

==========
Pinker)
2018 19:32:18
God creating the sun three days after he distinguished day from night).
==========
Pinker)
2018 21:01:21
Those modules include perception, memory, motivation, language understanding, and

action planning, and the fact that they can all access a common pool of currently
relevant information (the contents of consciousness) allows us to describe, grasp,
or approach what we see, to respond to what other people say or do, and to remember
and plan depending on what we want and what we know.
==========
Pinker)
2018 21:11:32
The God of the Old Testament murdered innocents by the millions, commanded the
Israelites to commit mass rape and genocide, and prescribed the death penalty for
blasphemy, idolatry, homosexuality, adultery, talking back to parents, and working
on the Sabbath, while finding nothing particularly wrong with slavery, rape,
torture, mutilation, and genocide.
==========
Pinker)
2018 21:11:47
Today, of course, enlightened believers cherry-pick the humane injunctions while

allegorizing, spin-doctoring, or ignoring the vicious ones, and that’s just the
point: they read the Bible through the lens of Enlightenment humanism.
==========
Pinker)
2018 21:22:18
Their reaction has been called “I’m-an-atheist-but,” “belief-in-belief,”

“accommodationism,” and (in Coyne’s coinage) “faitheism.”
==========
Pinker)
2018 21:28:17
Just as religious institutions deserve praise when they pursue humanistic ends,
they should not be shielded from criticism when they obstruct those ends.
==========
Pinker)
2018 21:34:37
The first step toward wisdom is the realization that the laws of the universe don’t
care about you. The next is the realization that this does not imply that life is
meaningless, because people care about you, and vice versa. You care about
yourself, and you have a responsibility to respect the laws of the universe that
keep you alive, so you don’t squander your existence. Your loved ones care about
you, and you have a responsibility not to orphan your children, widow your spouse,
and shatter your parents. And anyone with a humanistic sensibility cares about you,
not in the sense of feeling your pain—human empathy is too feeble to spread itself
across billions of strangers—but in the sense of realizing that your existence is
cosmically no less important than theirs, and that we all have a responsibility to
use the laws of the universe to enhance the conditions in which we all can
flourish.
==========
Pinker)
2018 21:39:19
With all these numbers showing that people are becoming less religious, where did
the idea of a religious revival come from? It comes from what Quebecers call la
revanche du berceau, the revenge of the cradle. Religious people have more babies.
==========
Pinker)
2018 22:09:15
Protestants (13.5 percent). The cohort gradient is

==========
Pinker)
2018 22:11:48
religious, holding other factors constant.83 But the most obvious reason may be
reason itself: when people become more intellectually curious and scientifically
literate, they stop believing in miracles.
==========
Pinker)
2018 22:12:28
Many irreligious societies like Canada, Denmark, and New Zealand are among the
nicest places to live in the history of our kind (with high levels of every
measurable good thing in life), while many of the world’s most religious societies
are hellholes.
==========
Pinker)
2018 22:14:29
Some of the regressive customs found in Muslim-majority countries, such as female

genital mutilation and “honor killings” of unchaste sisters and daughters, are
ancient African or West Asian tribal practices and are misattributed by their
perpetrators to Islamic law.
==========
Pinker)
2018 22:14:53
Still others were exacerbated by clumsy Western interventions in the Middle East,
including the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, support of the anti-Soviet
mujahedin in Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq.
==========
Pinker)
2018 22:22:46
If one wanted to single out a thinker who represented the opposite of humanism
(indeed, of pretty much every argument in this book), one couldn’t do better than
the German philologist Friedrich Nietzsche
==========
Pinker)
2018 22:40:13
Dictators implement theories from the top down, assigning a role to intellectuals
that they feel is commensurate with their worth. But tyrannophilia is also fed by a
Nietzschean disdain for the common man, who annoyingly prefers schlock to fine art
and culture, and by an admiration of the superman who transcends the messy
compromises of democracy and heroically implements a vision of the good society.
==========
Pinker)
2018 22:58:42
Fascism, from the Italian word for “group” or “bundle,” grew out of the Romantic
notion that the individual is a myth and that people are inextricable from their
culture, bloodline, and homeland.
==========
Pinker)
2018 23:01:44
Society should aim higher than this stunted individualism, and promote conformity
to more rigorous moral standards from an authority larger than ourselves.
==========
Pinker)
2018 23:04:06
With the stakes this high, it’s good to remind ourselves why the case for neo-theo-
reactionary-populist nationalism is intellectually bankrupt.
==========
Pinker)
2018 23:04:54
Like the supposed innate imperative to belong to a religion, it confuses a

vulnerability with a need. People undoubtedly feel solidarity with their tribe, but
whatever intuition of “tribe” we are born with cannot be a nation-state,
==========
- Your Highlight on page 512 | location 7846-7847 | Added on Friday, 10 August 2018
13:03:24
has been a rise of new populist groups from the Tea Party in the United States to
various anti-EU, anti-immigrant parties in Europe. What unites all of them is the
belief that elites in their countries have betrayed them.
==========
19:53:54
The future of democracy in developed countries will depend on their ability to deal
with the problem of a disappearing middle class.
==========
19:54:37
The only real long-term solution would be an educational system that succeeded in
pushing the vast majority of citizens into higher levels of education and skills.
==========
20:02:41
The problem with scientific management is that even the most qualified scientists
occasionally get things wrong, and sometimes get them wrong in a big way.
==========
20:14:52
Institutions, according to Huntington, are “stable, valued, recurring patterns of

behavior” whose most important function is to facilitate human collective action.
==========
20:17:49
Political institutions develop as new social groups emerge

==========
20:17:54
Political institutions develop as new social groups emerge and challenge the
existing equilibrium.
==========
20:18:32
the former outsiders become insiders.

==========
20:20:01
In the absence of strong institutional incentives, the groups with access to a

political system will use their positions to favor friends and family, and thereby
erode the impersonality of the state.
==========
20:22:47
Elite insiders typically have superior access to resources and information, which
they use to protect themselves. Ordinary voters will not get angry at them for
stealing their money if they don’t know that this is happening in the first place.
Cognitive rigidities may also prevent social groups from mobilizing in their own
self-interest.
==========
20:27:16
The three categories of political institutions—state, rule of law, and democracy—

are embodied in the three branches of government of a modern liberal democracy—the
executive, the judiciary, and the legislature.
==========
20:48:22
The origins of the American approach lie in the historical sequence by which its
three sets of institutions evolved. In Britain, France, and Germany, law came
first, followed by a modern state, and only later by democracy.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 193 | location 2957-2959 | Added on Saturday, 18 August
2018 13:12:17
The less sleep an individual was getting in the week before facing the active
common cold virus, the more likely it was that they would be infected and catch a
cold. In those sleeping five hours on average, the infection rate was almost 50
percent. In those sleeping seven hours or more a night in the week prior, the
infection rate was just 18 percent.
==========
2018 13:12:45
However, that flu shot is only effective if your body actually reacts to it by
generating antibodies.
==========
2018 13:15:20
Irwin demonstrated that a single night of four hours of sleep—such as going to bed
at three a.m. and waking up at seven a.m.—swept away 70 percent of the natural
killer cells
==========
2018 13:15:32
Irwin demonstrated that a single night of four hours of sleep—such as going to bed
at three a.m. and waking up at seven a.m.—swept away 70 percent of the natural
killer cells circulating in the immune system, relative to a full eight-hour night
of sleep.
==========
2018 13:23:59
In particular, a lack of sleep will cause a drop in high-density lipoproteins

(HDLs)—a directional profile that has consistently been linked to cardiovascular
disease.IV
==========
2018 13:24:58
For chromosomes, that protective cap is called a telomere. If the telomeres at the
end of your chromosomes become damaged, your DNA spirals become exposed and your
now vulnerable genetic code cannot operate properly, like a fraying shoelace
without a tip.
==========
2018 13:25:09
The less sleep an individual obtains, or the worse the quality of sleep, the more
damaged the capstone telomeres of that individual’s chromosomes. These are the
findings of a collection
==========
2018 13:25:16
The less sleep an individual obtains, or the worse the quality of sleep, the more
damaged the capstone telomeres of that individual’s chromosomes.
==========
2018 13:26:18
Neglect sleep, and you are deciding to perform a genetic engineering manipulation
on yourself each night, tampering with the nucleic
==========
2018 13:26:36
Neglect sleep, and you are deciding to perform a genetic engineering manipulation
on yourself each night, tampering with the nucleic alphabet that spells out your
daily health story.
==========
2018 13:44:12
“Your dream, Kyle, is about time, and more specifically, about not having enough
time to do the things you really want to do in
==========
2018 13:44:18
“Your dream, Kyle, is about time, and more specifically, about not having enough
time to do the things you really want to do in life.”
==========
2018 13:53:04
workings of the mind while awake and asleep. Unfortunately, the field of
neuroscience was still in its infancy at the time. Science was simply not up to the
task of deconstructing dreams, and so unscientific postulates such as Freud’s were
inevitable. We should not blame him for that, but we should also not accept an
unscientific explanation of dreams because of that.
==========
2018 14:20:57
had to achieve a kind of representation in stone of my innermost thoughts and of

the knowledge I had acquired.
==========
2018 14:26:34
At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am
myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the
animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons.
==========
2018 14:28:40
Here stands the mean, uncomely stone, ‘Tis very cheap in price! The more it is
despised by fools, The more loved by the wise.
==========
2018 14:31:02
It is a manifestation of the occupant, but one which remains incomprehensible to

others.
==========
2018 14:37:36
It may be suggested that this is a phenomenon of solitude, the outward emptiness

and silence being compensated by the image of a crowd of people.
==========
2018 14:56:05
But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which
has given rise to the “discontents” of civilization and to such a flurry and haste
that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in
the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up.
==========
2018 14:56:32
We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the
present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last
bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is
purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater
freedom
==========
2018 14:56:41
freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the
terrible perils to which the
==========
2018 14:56:45
freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the
terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us.
==========
2018 14:57:07
The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we
understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of
his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass,
ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.
==========
- Your Bookmark on page 262 | location 4012 | Added on Saturday, 18 August 2018
14:57:30
==========
11:30:42
a European parliamentary system, a new rule or regulation promulgated by a

bureaucracy is subject to scrutiny and debate, and can be changed through political
action at the next election. In the United States, policy is made piecemeal in a
highly specialized and therefore nontransparent process by judges who are often
unelected and serve with lifetime tenure.
==========
11:31:04
The explosion of opportunities for litigation gave access and therefore power to
many formerly excluded groups, beginning with African Americans. For this reason,
litigation and the right to sue has been jealously guarded by many on the
progressive left. But it also entailed large costs in terms of the quality of
public policy.
==========
11:34:04
This decentralized, legalistic approach to administration then dovetails with the

other notable feature of the American political system, its openness to the
influence of interest groups. Interest groups get their way through their ability
to use the court system to sue the government directly.
==========
11:34:22
How nineteenth-century clientelism has been replaced by interest group reciprocity;

how interest groups affect the quality of public policies; whether interest groups
are good or bad for democracy; repatrimonialization of the American state
==========
11:34:55
Politicians mobilized voters to go to the polls by making promises of

individualized benefits, sometimes in the form of small favors or outright cash
payments, but most often through offers of jobs in government bureaucracies on a
federal, state, and municipal level.
==========
11:37:10
What is not covered by the law is what biologists call reciprocal altruism, or what
an anthropologist might label a gift exchange. In a relationship of reciprocal
altruism, one person confers a benefit on another with no explicit expectation that
it will immediately buy a return favor, unlike an impersonal market transaction.
==========
11:37:36
The law bans only the market transaction but not the exchange of favors, and that
is what the American lobbying industry is built around.
==========
11:38:11
I argued earlier that kin selection and reciprocal altruism are the two natural
modes of human sociability. They are not learned behaviors but are genetically
encoded in our brains and emotions. A human being in any culture who receives a
gift from another member of the community will feel a moral obligation to
reciprocate.
==========
11:42:29
The explosion of interest groups and lobbying in Washington has been astonishing,
with 175 registered lobbying firms in 1971 rising to 2,500 ten years later, and
then to more than 12,000 registered lobbyists spending more than $3.2 billion by
2013.
==========
11:43:24
In the contemporary United States, elites speak the language of liberty but are
perfectly happy to settle for privilege.
==========
11:43:46
Often, however, the goal of interest groups and lobbyists is not to stimulate new
policies but to prevent outcomes unfavorable to themselves but in the public
interest from ever seeing the light of day.
==========
11:47:36
Olson argued that democracies in times of peace and stability tended to accumulate
ever-increasing numbers of interest groups.
==========
11:48:09
ever-increasing numbers of interest groups. These groups, instead of pursuing
wealth-creating economic activities, made use of the political system to extract
benefits or rents for themselves. These rents were unproductive in the aggregate
==========
11:48:15
ever-increasing numbers of interest groups. These groups, instead of pursuing
wealth-creating economic activities, made use of the political system to extract
benefits or rents for themselves.
==========
11:49:07
Individuals by themselves were weak; only by joining with others for common
purposes could they, among other things, resist tyrannical government.
==========
- Your Bookmark on page 542 | location 8310 | Added on Sunday, 19 August 2018
11:49:13
==========
- Your Note on page 543 | location 8315 | Added on Sunday, 19 August 2018 11:51:45
Strong education framework leads to lr better technocrats. However They turn into
lobbyists lookig for self interests
==========
11:52:56
How, then, do we reconcile these diametrically opposed narratives—that interest

groups are corrupting democracy and harming economic growth, and that they are
necessary conditions for a healthy democracy?
==========
11:55:15
He noted that political outcomes seldom correspond with popular preferences, that
there is a very low level of participation and political awareness, and that real
decisions are taken by much smaller groups of organized interests.16 A similar
argument is buried in Mancur Olson’s framework: he notes that not all groups are
equally capable of organizing for collective action.
==========
12:00:20
people’s views on highly emotional subjects from immigration to abortion to drugs

will change just thirty minutes into a face-to-face discussion with people of
differing views, provided that they are given common information and ground rules
that enforce civility.
==========
12:03:39
But the overall quality of American public administration remains very problematic,
precisely because of the country’s continuing reliance on courts and parties at the
expense of state administration.
==========
13:31:22
There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second
is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in
the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
==========
13:33:52
The more his story is told, the more the details drift.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 550 | location 8425-8425 | Added on Tuesday, 28 August
2018 15:17:14
how other democracies have stronger mechanisms to force collective decisions;

==========
2018 15:18:22
In contrast to a parliamentary system, in which a unified executive (that is, an

executive centralized under a single authority) carries out the wishes of
legislative majorities, the American presidential system splits authority between
an elected president and a Congress that have equal democratic legitimacy and whose
survival is independent of one another.
==========
2018 15:20:22
Of the most important challenges facing developed democracies is the

unsustainability of their welfare-state commitments.
==========
2018 15:23:38
Sweden, Finland, and other Scandinavian countries found their large welfare states
in crisis during the 1990s and were able to make adjustments to their tax and
spending levels.
==========
2018 15:26:16
Polarization is not the end of the story, however. Democratic political systems are
not supposed to end conflict; they are supposed to peacefully resolve and lessen
conflicts through agreed-upon rules.
==========
2018 15:27:01
Democratic decisions should be taken by consensus, where every single member of the
community agrees on a particular decision. This is what typically happens in
families, and in band- and tribal-level societies.
==========
2018 15:27:51
The smaller the percentage of the group necessary to take a decision, the easier
and more efficiently it can be made.
==========
2018 15:28:08
As anyone who has chaired a meeting of a club or committee knows, decision costs
rise exponentially if one needs consensus in large groups. Decisions taken under a
majority
==========
2018 15:28:12
As anyone who has chaired a meeting of a club or committee knows, decision costs
rise exponentially if one needs consensus in large groups.
==========
2018 15:28:42
Decisions taken under a majority voting rule (50 percent plus one) often used in
democratic countries thus deviate very far from an ideal democratic procedure,
since they can disenfranchise nearly half the population.
==========
2018 15:30:24
Under the Meiji Constitution, if the Diet couldn’t agree on a new budget, the
previous year’s budget was automatically adopted. Under the reversionary rules
adopted in Chile and other Latin American countries, failure to pass a budget meant
that budgetary authority went back to the president and the executive.
==========
2018 15:31:40
Parliamentary systems have evolved one of the best mechanisms for forcing
legislative decisions ever invented: if there is deadlock or a high degree of
contention over a particular issue, the government can dissolve parliament and call
for new elections, allowing a democratic
==========
2018 15:31:48
Parliamentary systems have evolved one of the best mechanisms for forcing
legislative decisions ever invented: if there is deadlock or a high degree of
contention over a particular issue, the government can dissolve parliament and call
for new elections, allowing a democratic electorate to speak directly to the issue
at hand.
==========
2018 15:33:01
A veto player is simply political science lingo for what Americans have
traditionally called checks and balances.
==========
2018 15:34:06
it is possible to array different political systems on a linear scale going from an
absolute dictatorship, in which there is only one veto player (the dictator), to a
consensus system in which every citizen wields a potential veto over action by the
whole. Democratic political systems grant many more vetoes to players within the
system than do authoritarian states; that’s why they are democracies.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 555 | location 8510 | Added on Tuesday, 28 August 2018
15:34:17
==========
- Your Bookmark on page 556 | location 8515 | Added on Tuesday, 28 August 2018
15:36:37
==========
2018 15:37:05
America’s large number of veto players becomes evident when the U.S. system is
compared to that of another long-standing democracy, Britain. The Westminster
system, which evolved in the years following the Glorious Revolution, is one of the
most decisive in the democratic world because, in its pure form, it creates a much
smaller number of veto players. In Britain, citizens have one large, formal check
on government—their ability to periodically elect Parliament. (There is another
important check, a free media, which is not part of the formal political system.)
In all other respects, however, the system concentrates rather than diffuses power.
A pure Westminster system has only a single all-powerful legislative chamber, no
separate presidency, no written constitution and therefore no judicial review, and
no federalism or constitutionally mandated devolution of powers to localities.
==========
2018 15:39:32
courts, states, municipalities, or other bodies. It is for this reason that the
British system is often described as a “democratic dictatorship.”
==========
2018 15:39:46
It is for this reason that the British system is often described as a “democratic
dictatorship.”9
==========
2018 20:18:04
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was established in 1974 to provide

Congress with greater technocratic support in drawing up budgets, but in the end
the making of an American budget is a highly decentralized and nonstrategic process
in comparison to what happens in Britain.
==========
2018 20:19:13
committee chairs and party leaders have enormous

==========
2018 20:19:19
In most European parliamentary systems, it makes no sense for an interest group to

lobby an individual MP, since the rules of party discipline give him or her little
or no influence over the party leadership’s position. In the United States, by
contrast, committee chairs and party leaders have enormous powers to modify
legislation and therefore become the target of lobbying activity.
==========
2018 20:19:49
The Westminster system for all of its concentrated powers nonetheless remains
fundamentally democratic. It is democratic because if voters don’t like the kinds
of policies and state performance it produces, they are free to vote the current
government out and replace it with another.
==========
2018 20:20:19
Governments are judged much more on their overall performance than on their ability
to provide specific pork barrel benefits to particular interest groups or lobbies.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 558 | location 8554-8556 | Added on Wednesday, 29 August
2018 11:28:42
those Latin American countries which, having copied the U.S. presidential system in
the nineteenth century, have faced similar problems with gridlock and politicized
administration.
==========
2018 11:31:41
In a parliamentary system, a great deal of legislation is formulated in the

executive branch with heavy technocratic input from the permanent civil service.
Ministries are accountable to parliament and hence ultimately to voters through the
ministers who head them, but this type of hierarchical system can take a longer-
term strategic view and produce much more coherent legislation.
==========
2018 11:34:47
The lack of legislative coherence in turn produces a large, sprawling, and often
unaccountable government. Congress’s multiple committees frequently produce
duplicative and overlapping
==========
2018 11:34:55
The lack of legislative coherence in turn produces a large, sprawling, and often
unaccountable government. Congress’s multiple committees frequently produce
duplicative and overlapping programs, or create multiple agencies with similar
mandates.
==========
2018 11:36:57
Congress created fifty-one separate programs for worker retraining, and eighty-two
projects to improve teacher quality.
==========
2018 11:38:17
The federal agencies are overseen by different congressional committees who are
loath to give up their turf to a more coherent and unified regulator.
==========
2018 11:47:09
hard to see how it would be possible to govern properly without them under modern
circumstances. America
==========
2018 12:08:37
these agencies altogether, it is hard to see how it

==========
2018 12:10:46
Ironically, however, Americans when polled show the highest degree of approval
precisely for those institutions—the military, NASA, the CDC—that are the least
subject to immediate democratic oversight. Part of the reason they are admired is
that they actually get things done.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 562 | location 8612 | Added on Wednesday, 29 August 2018
12:17:41
==========
2018 12:18:13
The American political system thus presents a complex picture in which checks and
balances excessively constrain decision making on the part of majorities, as well
as instances of excessive or potentially dangerous delegations of authority to
poorly accountable institutions.
==========
2018 12:18:41
Congress frequently fails in its duty to provide clear legislative guidance on how
a particular agency is to perform its task, leaving it up to the agency itself to
write its own mandate. In doing so, Congress hopes that if things don’t work out,
the courts will step in to correct abuses.
==========
2018 12:35:17
members of parliament become ministers who have the hierarchical authority to

direct the bureaucracies they control. Parliamentary systems can be blocked if
parties are excessively fragmented and coalitions unstable, as has been the case
frequently in Italy. But once a parliamentary majority has been established, there
is a relatively clean delegation of authority to an executive agency. Such
straightforward delegations are harder to achieve in a presidential system, where
the two branches often find themselves competing with each other. Simply
strengthening one branch at the expense of the others does not overcome the problem
posed by the original separation of powers.
==========
2018 12:39:16
Instead of straightforwardly delegating power to a single agency head who is then

accountable to the president, early regulatory agencies reported instead to a group
of commissioners balanced between the two parties. Congress was in effect
delegating control to the executive while at the same time strictly controlling
that delegation.
==========
2018 22:20:34
Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and Switzerland have been able to sustain
higher levels of trust in government, which makes public administration less
adversarial, more consensus based and, in the early twenty-first century, better
able to adapt to changing conditions of globalization.
==========
2018 22:29:09
The American political system has decayed over time because its traditional system
of checks and balances has deepened and become increasingly rigid. With sharp
political polarization, this decentralized system is less and less able to
represent majority interests but gives excessive representation to the views of
interest groups and activist organizations that collectively do not add up to a
sovereign American people.
==========
2018 22:29:33
The Madisonian system of checks and balances and the clientelistic, party-driven
political system that emerged in the early nineteenth century were adequate for
governing a largely agrarian country where most citizens lived on isolated family
farms.
==========
2018 22:31:05
Instead, Congress mandates complex rules that reduce the government’s autonomy and
make decisions slow and expensive. The government then doesn’t perform well, which
confirms people’s original distrust.
==========
2018 22:34:24
A realistic reform agenda would have to balance long-term objectives against

political realities.
==========
22:46:40
forefront of Kennedy’s New Frontier and Dr. King’s magnificent dream.

==========
22:51:06
The ugly conquest of the native Hawaiians through aborted treaties and crippling
disease brought by the missionaries; the carving up of rich volcanic soil by
American companies for sugarcane and pineapple plantations; the indenturing system
that kept Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino immigrants stooped sunup to sunset in
these same fields; the internment of Japanese-Americans during the war-all this was
recent history.
==========
22:51:18
And yet, by the time my family arrived, it had somehow vanished from collective
memory, like morning mist that the sun burned away. There were too many races, with
power among them too diffuse, to impose the mainland’s rigid caste system; and so
few blacks that the most ardent segregationist could enjoy a vacation secure in the
knowledge that race mixing in Hawaii had little to do with the established order
back home.
==========
23:36:28
There wasn’t much light left, but we took a short walk down the mud path into the
village. Groups of giggling neighborhood children waved from their compounds, and a
few barefoot old men came up to shake our hands.
==========
23:38:50
Later, lying alone beneath a mosquito net canopy, I listened to the crickets chirp
under the moonlight and remembered the last twitch of life that I’d witnessed a few
hours before. I could barely believe my good fortune.
==========
23:41:32
glancing up at him every so often and realizing how familiar his face had become
after our two years together, as familiar as the earth on which we stood.
==========
23:52:10
“Better to be strong,” he said finally, rising to his feet. “If you can’t be
strong, be clever and make peace with someone who’s strong. But always better to be
strong yourself. Always.”
==========
11:15:19
He didn’t talk that way anymore. In fact, it seemed as though he barely spoke to
her at all, only out of necessity or when spoken to, and even then only of the task
at hand, repairing a leak or planning a trip to visit some distant cousin.
==========
11:50:58
The idea frightened her, the notion that history could be swallowed up so
completely, the same way the rich and loamy earth could soak up the rivers of blood
that had once coursed through the streets; the way people could continue about
their business beneath giant posters of the new president as if nothing had
happened, a nation busy developing itself.
==========
11:57:50
She had always encouraged my rapid acculturation in Indonesia: It had made me

relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well
mannered when compared to other American children. She had taught me to disdain the
blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad.
==========
12:00:43
And through it all was the pervading sense that her child’s life might slip away
when she wasn’t looking, that everyone else around her would be too busy trying to
survive to notice-that, when it counted, she would have plenty of sympathy but no
one beside her who believed in fighting against a threatening fate.
==========
12:04:47
When she told me stories of schoolchildren in the South who were forced to read
books handed down from wealthier white schools but who went on to become doctors
and lawyers and scientists, I felt chastened by my reluctance to wake up and study
in the mornings.
==========
Sex at Dawn (Christopher Ryan)
12:14:53
Homo sapiens is one of the five surviving species of great apes, along with
chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans (gibbons are considered a “lesser
ape”).
==========
12:19:11
The campaign to obscure the true nature of our species’ sexuality leaves half our
marriages collapsing under an unstoppable tide of swirling sexual frustration,
libido-killing boredom, impulsive betrayal, dysfunction, confusion, and shame.
==========
13:21:15
There’s an old story about the trial of a man charged with biting off another man’s
finger in a fight. An eyewitness took the stand. The defense attorney asked, “Did
you actually see my client bite off the finger?” The witness said, “Well, no, I
didn’t.” “Aha!” said the attorney with a smug smile. “How then can you claim he bit
off the man’s finger?” “Well,” replied the witness, “I saw him spit it out.”
==========
13:21:31
In addition to a great deal of circumstantial evidence from societies around the

world and closely related nonhuman primates, we’ll take a look at some of what
evolution has spit out.
==========
13:26:53
Suddenly, women lived in a world where they had to barter their reproductive
==========
13:26:59
Suddenly, women lived in a world where they had to barter their reproductive
capacity for access to the resources and protection they needed to survive.
==========
13:28:03
evidence of agriculture dating to about 8000 BCE, the

==========
13:28:08
With the earliest evidence of agriculture dating to about 8000 BCE, the amount of
time our species has spent living in settled agricultural societies represents just
5 percent of our collective experience, at most.
==========
13:29:10
once they started farming and raising domesticated

==========
13:29:18
But human societies changed in radical ways once they started farming and raising
domesticated animals. They organized themselves around hierarchical political
structures, private property, densely populated settlements, a radical shift in the
status of women, and other social configurations that together represent an
enigmatic disaster for our species: human population growth mushroomed as quality
of life plummeted.
==========
13:30:33
Several types of evidence suggest our pre-agricultural (prehistoric) ancestors

lived in groups where most mature individuals would have had several ongoing sexual
relationships at any given time. Though often casual, these relationships were not
random or meaningless. Quite the opposite: they reinforced crucial social ties
holding these highly interdependent communities together.7
==========
13:30:38

==========
13:30:42

==========
13:31:00

==========
13:35:25
After all, we know that the foraging societies in which human beings evolved were
small-scale, highly egalitarian groups who shared almost everything.
==========
13:47:27
Sharing is not just encouraged; it’s mandatory. Hoarding or hiding food, for
example, is considered deeply shameful, almost unforgivable behavior in these
societies.9
==========
14:37:59
In addition to voluminous scientific evidence, many explorers, missionaries, and

anthropologists support this view, having penned accounts rich with tales of
orgiastic rituals, unflinching mate sharing, and an open sexuality unencumbered by
guilt or shame.
==========
14:38:33
you spend time with the primates closest to human beings, you’ll see female chimps
having intercourse dozens of times per day, with most or all of the willing males,
and rampant bonobo group sex that leaves everyone relaxed and maintains intricate
social networks.
==========
14:42:30
Once people were farming the same land season after season, private property
quickly replaced communal ownership as the modus operandi in most societies.
==========
14:44:17
But when people began living in settled agricultural communities, social reality
shifted deeply and irrevocably. Suddenly it became crucially important to know
where your field ended and your neighbor’s began.
==========
14:44:52
Clearly, the biggest loser (aside from slaves, perhaps) in the agricultural
revolution was the human female, who went from occupying a central, respected role
in foraging societies to becoming another possession for a man to earn and defend,
along with his house, slaves, and livestock.
==========
14:46:51
With agriculture, virtually everything changed: the nature of status and power,
social and family structures, how humans interacted with
==========
14:46:59
social and family structures, how humans interacted with the natural world, the
gods they worshipped, the likelihood and nature of warfare between groups, quality
of life, longevity,
==========
14:47:05
social and family structures, how humans interacted with the natural world, the
gods they worshipped, the likelihood and nature of warfare between groups, quality
of life, longevity, and certainly, the rules governing sexuality.
==========
14:51:31
Each spring, thousands of American university students celebrate with wet T-shirt
contests, foam parties, and Jell-O wrestling on the beautiful beaches of the I Do
Not Understand You Peninsula.
==========
14:55:27
Insects are richer in minerals and healthy fats than beef or pork. Freaked out by
the exoskeleton, antennae, and way too many legs? Then stick to the Turf and forget
the Surf because shrimp, crabs, and lobsters are all arthropods, just like
grasshoppers. And they eat the nastiest of what sinks to the bottom of the ocean,
==========
15:02:41
Too many scientists are hard at work trying to complete the wrong puzzle,
struggling to force their findings into preconceived, culturally approved notions
of what they think human sexuality should be rather than letting the pieces of
information fall where they may.
==========
16:45:51
Sigmund Freud got it right when he observed that “civilization” is built largely on
erotic energy that has been blocked, concentrated, accumulated, and redirected.
==========
16:52:11
vehemently proper wife, Emma Wedgwood, who was

==========
16:55:19
“Mythology is the loom on which [we] weave the raw materials of daily experience
into a coherent story.”
==========
16:58:07
As long as population increases geometrically, doubling each generation (2, 4, 8,

16, 32, etc.), and farmers can increase the food supply only by adding acreage
arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.), there will never—can never—be enough for
everyone.
==========
16:58:27
Thus, Malthus concluded that poverty is as inescapable as the wind and the rain.
Nobody’s fault. Just the way it is. This conclusion was very popular with the
wealthy and powerful, who were understandably eager to make sense of their good
fortune and justify the suffering of the poor as an unavoidable fact of life.
==========
16:59:50
The sober tones of serious science often mask the mythical nature of what we’re
told about prehistory. And far too often, the myth is dysfunctional, inaccurate,
and self-justifying.
==========
17:05:45
“a spiral of comforting justification, proving how we came to be as we are.”16

==========
17:14:24
Romantic love is reduced to a chemical reaction luring us into reproductive

entanglements parental love keeps us from escaping. Theirs is an all-encompassing
narrative
==========
17:14:30
Romantic love is reduced to a chemical reaction luring us into reproductive

entanglements parental love keeps us from escaping.
==========
17:27:57
“Move on?” Really? Is abandonment of one’s family the “adult” option for dealing
with the inherent conflict between socially sanctioned romantic ideals and the
inconvenient truths of sexual passion?23 Darwin’s sense of the coy female wasn’t
based only on his Victorian assumptions. In addition to natural selection, he
proposed a second mechanism for evolutionary change: sexual selection. The central
premise of sexual selection is that in most mammals, the female has a much higher
investment in offspring than does the male. She’s stuck with gestation, lactation,
and extended nurturing of the young. Because of this inequality in unavoidable
sacrifice, Darwin reasoned, she is the more hesitant participant, needing to be
convinced it’s a good idea—while the male, with his slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am
approach to reproduction, is eager to do the convincing. Evolutionary psychology is
founded on the belief that male and female approaches to mating have intrinsically
conflicted agendas. The selection of the winning bachelor typically involves male
competition: rams
==========
17:28:06
“Move on?” Really? Is abandonment of one’s family the “adult” option for dealing
with the inherent conflict between socially sanctioned romantic ideals and the
inconvenient truths of sexual passion?23
==========
17:31:41
“The husbands lived in polygyny [i.e., more than one wife], and the wives in
polyandry [i.e., more than one husband], which are seen to be as ancient as human
society.
==========
Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory (Peter Hessler)
17:52:19
Chinese urban planners, some of whom had been educated in the States, encouraged
cities to demolish their ancient defensive walls and use the material to build loop
roads suitable for cars.
==========
18:14:48
“I’m sure they would,” I said. “You don’t understand Chinese people!” Mr. Wang
said, laughing, and the other men nodded their heads in agreement. As a foreigner,
I often heard that, and it had a way of ending discussion.
==========
18:17:10
“Well, sometimes if a driver hits a big dog,” Mr. Wang said, “he just throws it in
the trunk, takes it home, and cooks it.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking; he was a
dog owner himself, but in China that doesn’t necessarily involve dietary
restrictions.
==========
18:29:47
In 1923, National Geographic Magazine claimed that the Great Wall is visible to the
human eye from the moon. (In truth, nobody on the moon could see it in 1923, and
they still can’t.) For a while, Chinese intellectuals tried to resist such
exaggerations, believing rightly that the foreigners had confused both history and
geography. But eventually the myths proved appealing to nationalists like Mao
Zedong, who used the Great Wall in propaganda, recognizing the symbolic value of a
unified barrier.
==========
18:46:16
Lots of answers involve honking. In a Chinese automobile, the horn is essentially

neurological—it channels the driver’s reflexes. People honk constantly, and at
first all horns sound the same, but over time you learn to interpret them. In
==========
18:46:26
Lots of answers involve honking. In a Chinese automobile, the horn is essentially

neurological—it channels the driver’s reflexes. People honk constantly, and at
first all horns sound the same, but over time you learn to interpret them.
==========
21:23:41
The others murmured in agreement. “You know the saying: The mountains are high and
the emperor is far away,” the young farmer said. “The country’s leaders are sitting
in a high place, and they have no idea what’s really going on. And the people don’t
know what the country’s leaders really say. Local leaders are the biggest problem—
the county officials are the ones who embezzle everything.” He pointed at the Ming
fort, with its World Bank slogan. “We see the World Bank officials in their cars,
when they have inspections, but we can’t talk to them.
==========
21:28:06
Later, when I contacted a World Bank official, he insisted that the farmers were
wrong, and he noted that the bank’s projects on the loess plateau had already
benefited over one million people. But it was just another statistic: the only
thing I knew for certain was that those million beneficiaries did not include the
individuals I had spoken with. And I had always been wary of development work that
was administered from the capital, with little local contact. The mountains are
high, the NGOs far away—that
==========
21:30:46
Motor traffic was light, but it wasn’t uncommon to see somebody beside the road,
making the Chinese hitchhiking gesture: arm extended, palm down, hand bouncing as
if petting an invisible dog.
==========
21:31:39
Most people I picked up were women who looked almost as out of place as I did.
==========
21:38:21
From my perspective, everybody else had a head start of three thousand years, and I
felt desperate to catch up.
==========
22:54:10
But it’s unclear how effective this solution will be, and in the end it may be
pointless to bring water north while most young people are heading south.
==========
23:01:17
“They see more of the outside world now,” Jiang Hong said. “They can visit the
cities, and they see things on television. They want to have more of the material
benefits that they see.” In a sense, people had become more worldly, but this
contact with the outside was disorienting. The frame of reference no longer
consisted of the limited resources available in Wushenqi, but rather the infinite
products available in the city.
==========
23:01:24
By learning more about other places, residents had lost touch with their immediate
environment.
==========
23:01:33
“When things change so quickly, people don’t have time to gain information about
their environment,”
==========
23:05:15
For this generation, the economic landscape had become as unstable as the Ordos
sands. Everything shifted: the rules, the business practices, the challenges of
daily life. There was always some new situation to figure out, and it was hard for
people to get their bearings. Often the ones who reacted quickly without thinking
were the most successful. Sustainability was a luxury that few could afford to
worry about, especially in places where young people were likely to leave anyway.
Long-term planning made no sense: the goal was gain some profit today before you
found yourself overwhelmed by the next wave of change.
==========
23:35:42
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld sums it up in terms of fire and firemen: “The basic
conflict between men and women, sexually, is that men are like firemen. To men, sex
is an emergency, and no matter what we’re doing we can be ready in two minutes.
Women, on the other hand, are like fire. They’re very exciting, but the conditions
have to be exactly right for it to occur.”
==========
2018 22:28:26
Many countries therefore face a dual task of state building even as they
consolidate their democratic institutions.
==========
2018 22:28:56
The expectation is that the best way to strengthen states is to increase

transparency and democratic accountability.
==========
2018 22:30:54
Organizational dysfunction is said to occur because the agents often act self-
interestedly, for example, diverting money to their own bank accounts or promoting
their careers at the expense of the organization.
==========
2018 22:31:05
The cure is said to be an alignment of incentives that motivate the agents to

properly implement the principal’s commands. Principal-agent
==========
2018 22:31:12
The cure is said to be an alignment of incentives that motivate the agents to

properly implement the principal’s commands.
==========
2018 22:32:19
In the first place, it assumes that ordinary voters, if told about the corrupt or
clientelistic distribution of public resources, will inevitably demand programmatic
public policies that will distribute goods on an impersonal basis, as democratic
theory says they should. This ignores the fact that voters in many societies,
particularly poor ones, want the clientelistic distribution of resources because
they hope to personally benefit from it. Indeed, citizen demand for payoffs may be
what creates the clientelism in the first place.
==========
2018 22:34:48
And finally, the idea that public officials should be constrained by strict rules
and stripped of administrative discretion runs contrary to the most common
complaint about government, namely, that it is too rule bound, rigid, and lacking
in common sense.
==========
2018 22:35:05
All of this suggests that state building and democracy building are not the same
thing, and in the short run they often exist in a great deal of tension with one
another.
==========
2018 22:36:54
This need for technocratic competence is the first thing that puts good government
on a collision course with democracy.
==========
2018 22:43:20
Finally, state capacity is a function of resources. The best-trained and most

enthusiastic officials will not remain committed if they are not paid adequately,
or if they find themselves lacking the tools for doing their jobs. This is one of
the reasons that poor countries have poorly functioning governments. Melissa Thomas
notes that while a rich country like the United States spends approximately $17,000
per year per capita on government services of all sorts, the government of
Afghanistan spends only $17 when foreign donor contributions are excluded.
==========
2018 22:43:44
Agents who are not given sufficient leeway to exercise judgment in the crafting and
implementation of policies will not perform their jobs well, no matter how capable
they are as individuals or as organizations.
==========
2018 22:45:36
Chinese practice has always tended to favor discretion over strict rules,
reflecting the weak rule of law in the Chinese tradition. But the Confucians had a
point: too many strict rules oftentimes impede good decision making.
==========
2018 22:49:14
In China there are often duplicate functional agencies, one reporting to a chain of
command that goes through national ministries, the other reporting to municipal or
provincial governments; the result is inconsistent and ineffective policy.
==========
2018 22:49:50
A high degree of autonomy is what permits innovation, experimentation, and risk

taking in a bureaucracy. In a well-functioning organization, the boss gives general
orders to get something done, and the subordinates figure out how best to do it.
High-quality military organizations understand that junior officers have to be
given the “freedom to fail”: if the slightest mistake can end a career, then no one
will ever take risks.
==========
2018 22:51:23
Lack of autonomy is a major cause of poor government. People around the world hate
the rule-bound, rigid, paperwork-driven nature of bureaucracy. Bureaucrats
themselves derive power and authority from their ability to manipulate rules and
therefore have an interest in expanding their reach.
==========
2018 22:54:06
In both cases a strong tradition of autonomy led to high-quality military

organizations, but it also led to their usurping of the goal-setting authority of
the political leaders that were nominally their principals.
==========
2018 22:54:16
Even short of these extreme cases, tightly bonded, highly autonomous bureaucratic
organizations can be highly resistant to political direction; they can become
inbred, resistant to change, and unresponsive to societal needs.
==========
2018 22:56:50
Bureaucratic red tape is often so mind-numbingly complex that no one is able to

actually monitor whether or not the rules are being followed.
==========
2018 23:01:42
Autonomy is even higher in firms that rely on highly educated professionals. Law
firms, architectural firms, research labs, software companies, universities, and
similar organizations cannot possibly be organized along Taylorite lines.
==========
2018 23:03:50
In very low-capacity countries, the opposite is the case: one would want to
circumscribe the behavior of government officials with more rather than fewer rules
because one could not trust them to exercise good judgment or refrain from corrupt
behavior. On the other hand, if the same developing country agency were full of
professionals with graduate degrees from internationally recognized schools rather
than political cronies, one would not only feel safer granting them considerable
autonomy, but would actually want to reduce rule-boundedness in hopes of
encouraging the exercise of judgment and innovative behavior.
==========
2018 23:05:08
All organizations should want to increase capacity (move up the vertical axis), but
this involves costly long-term investments.
==========
2018 23:05:16
All organizations should want to increase capacity (move up the vertical axis), but
this involves costly long-term investments. In the short run, their strategy should
be to move as close to the line as possible.
==========
2018 23:06:13
In Controlling Corruption, Robert Klitgaard coined the formula Corruption =

Discretion − Accountability.
==========
2018 23:07:57
Whatever else it may imply, bureaucratic autonomy does not mean turning over the
process of decision making to “experts” who somehow know better than the public at
large what’s best for them.
==========
2018 23:08:07
a democracy, the people are ultimately the generals.

==========
2018 23:11:00
When people discover they can think for themselves, or know things that the
government doesn’t, they are much less willing to obey an edict simply because it
was issued by an official. It is the broad social mobilization reflecting the rise
of middle classes that has led to the spread of formal democracy around the world
over the past four decades.
==========
2018 23:11:09
But it constitutes a challenge for democratic systems as well, which are perceived
as being out of touch and unresponsive to their citizens.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 587 | location 8989-8994 | Added on Tuesday, 4 September
2018 21:45:14
If demands for accountability become just another weapon in partisan political

combat, they will not achieve their purpose. Formal systems that minutely measure
performance and punish poor performance often produce what the political scientist
Jane Mansbridge labels “sanction-based accountability,” a modern version of
Taylorism that is based more on fear than loyalty. Such systems are premised on the
idea that workers cannot be trusted to do their jobs in the absence of careful
external monitoring; they are surefire ways of killing risk taking and innovation
on the part of those being evaluated. Because these procedures, designed to
increase accountability and therefore legitimacy, have the ultimate impact of
making the government less effective, they paradoxically undercut its legitimacy.
==========
2018 21:46:44
The Confucians were right in arguing that no set of rules can ever be adequate to
produce good results in all cases.
==========
2018 21:46:52
There is an intangible factor that needs to be present to make the political system
work, which is trust.
==========
2018 21:47:03
Citizens must trust the government to make good decisions reflecting their
interests most of the time, while governments for their part must earn that trust
by being responsive and delivering on their promises.
==========
2018 21:49:00
Friedrich A. Hayek have argued, that human beings are never knowledgeable or wise
enough to be able to predict the outcomes of their efforts to design institutions
or plan policies with full ex ante knowledge of the results.
==========
2018 21:50:28
culturally diverse peoples had to solve similar problems, and they therefore came
up with parallel solutions even though they had limited or no physical contact with
one another.
==========
2018 21:53:49
Laws regulated family life, inheritance, and property, and provided for dispute
resolution in a sphere somewhat protected from the state. The only major world
civilization that did not develop rule of law in this sense was China, largely
because it never developed a transcendental religion on which law could be based.
==========
2018 22:11:10
While peasant revolts periodically broke out in agrarian societies from China and
Turkey to France and Germany, they could always be contained and were usually
savagely suppressed by the landowning elites.
==========
2018 22:20:15
While it may in some theoretical sense be possible for a country like Sierra Leone
or Afghanistan to turn itself into an industrial powerhouse like South Korea
through appropriate investment, these countries’ lack of strong institutions
forecloses this option for all practical purposes.
==========
2018 22:20:25
Rather than starting a business, a young entrepreneur is much more likely to enrich
himself by entering politics, organizing a militia, or otherwise scheming to grab a
share of the country’s resource wealth.
==========
2018 22:21:01
Peasants who had been politically inert over the preceding centuries moved to
cities or other centers of manufacturing employment, where they were transformed
into an industrial working class. Residents of cities acquired higher levels of
education and emerged as a new middle class.
==========
2018 22:22:46
In contemporary China, the state has sought to forestall this process by blocking
the formation of independent trade unions that would facilitate collective action
by workers, and by maintaining a high level of employment growth to keep workers
satisfied.
==========
2018 22:25:02
Oftentimes, social mobilization has occurred in the absence of sustained economic

growth, a phenomenon referred to earlier as “modernization without development”
(see Figure 30).
==========
2018 22:25:24
Under this scenario, social change occurs not under the pull of new industrial
employment but under the push of rural poverty. Peasants flock to cities because
they seemingly offer more choices and opportunities, but they are not subject to
the rigors of an expanding division of labor as in the classic industrialization
scenario.
==========
2018 22:33:53
nationalism, ethnicity, or religion—has frequently trumped

==========
2018 22:38:25
Effective states operate through law, but formal law can itself become an obstacle
to the exercise of an appropriate level of administrative discretion. This tension
was well understood in ancient China and was reflected in the debate between
Legalists and Confucians. So too in modern debates over rules versus discretion in
administrative law. Rules need to be clear and impersonal, but every legal system
adjusts the application of rules to fit particular circumstances.
==========
2018 22:39:00
The best bureaucracies have the autonomy to use judgment in decision making, to
take risks, and to innovate. The worst mechanically carry out detailed rules
written by other people. Ordinary citizens are driven crazy by bureaucrats who
can’t use common sense and insist on mindless rule following.
==========
2018 22:42:19
Finally, democracy can be in tension with itself: efforts to increase levels of

democratic participation and transparency can actually decrease the democratic
representativeness of the system as a whole. The great mass of individuals living
in democracy are not able by background or temperament to make complex public
policy decisions, and when they are asked to do so repeatedly the process is often
taken over by well-organized interest groups that can manipulate the process to
serve their narrow purposes. Excessive transparency can undermine deliberation.
==========
2018 22:43:41
Ideological diffusion has of course become much more intense with the development
of modern communications technology.
==========
2018 22:49:03
Human beings compete to cooperate, and cooperate to compete;

==========
2018 22:49:10
Human beings compete to cooperate, and cooperate to compete; cooperation and
competition are not alternatives but two sides of the same coin.
==========
2018 22:50:08
It was only the threat of violence that created strong demand for new forms of
political organization
==========
2018 22:50:12
It was only the threat of violence that created strong demand for new forms of
political organization to ensure the community’s physical survival.
==========
2018 22:53:05
At other times, it was nonelites who were the obstacles to modernizing change.
Barrington Moore noted that the commercialization of agriculture in England under
the parliamentary enclosure movement, necessary to create a modern capitalist land
tenure system, required a slow-motion revolution under which peasants were forcibly
driven off the lands their families had inhabited for generations.
==========
2018 23:51:02
There are thus a number of ways of getting to a modern state. Violence was
important in incentivizing political innovation as a historical matter, but it does
not remain a necessary condition for reform in cases that come later. Those
societies have the option of learning from earlier experiences and adapting other
models to their own societies. POLITICAL
==========
2018 23:51:08
There are thus a number of ways of getting to a modern state. Violence was
important in incentivizing political innovation as a historical matter, but it does
not remain a necessary condition for reform in cases that come later. Those
societies have the option of learning from earlier experiences and adapting other
models to their own societies.
==========
2018 23:52:52
I agree with Aristotle’s assertion in the Politics that human beings are political
by nature and can achieve their highest level of flourishing only to the extent
that they participate in a shared life.
==========
2018 23:58:26
State-level societies presiding over agrarian economies could persist for
centuries, sometimes with law but never with democratic accountability.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 609 | location 9334-9335 | Added on Wednesday, 5 September
2018 00:01:02
The purpose of law is to codify and make transparent the community’s rules of
justice and to enforce them evenhandedly.
==========
2018 00:02:04
Similarly, democratic procedures regarding free and fair elections do not guarantee
the substantive end of accountability. Electoral procedures themselves can be
gamed, from outright fraud and vote rigging to more subtle efforts to redraw
electoral districts to suit one party, or to disqualify voters of the other.
==========
2018 00:04:02
The human propensity to invest rules with emotional meaning is what makes them
stable over long periods of time, but their rigidity becomes a liability when
circumstances change.
==========
2018 00:09:29
The central issue facing China today is whether, a mere thirty-five years since the
initiation of Deng’s reforms, the Chinese regime is itself now suffering from
political decay and losing the autonomy that was the source of its earlier success.
China’s policy agenda in the coming decade will be very different from what it was
over the past generation. It is now a middle-income country striving to become a
high-income one. The old export-driven model has run its course and needs to rely
much more heavily on domestic demand. China can no longer exploit extensive
economic growth and the mass mobilization of people into an industrial economy. In
its quest for high growth, China has built up huge environmental liabilities that
become manifest in unbreathable air, “cancer villages” dotting the country, a
failing food safety system, and other daunting problems. It is not clear whether
China’s educational system is capable of supplying the kinds of skills necessary to
sustain broad-based improvements in productivity. A deeper question is whether true
innovation can be sustained in the absence of greater individual freedom. With the
complexity of the Chinese economy, informational requirements for managing it have
also grown. As in dynastic China, the ability of a top-down command-and-control
system to stay abreast of what is actually happening in the society is
questionable.6
==========
2018 00:12:36
Some observers have suggested that poor countries may be “trapped” in poverty
because of the intertwined dimensions of political and economic development.
==========
2018 00:12:53
institutions are very hard to create in conditions of extreme poverty and political
fractionalization.
==========
2018 00:13:57
Today, there is a large body of accumulated experience about institutions, and a

growing international community that shares information, knowledge, and resources.
There are, moreover, multiple paths and entry points toward development.
==========
2018 00:18:47
squabbling and shady deals, paving the way for Yanukovich’s

==========
2018 00:19:43
India has been held back by a similar gap in performance when compared to
authoritarian China. It is very impressive that India has held together, with one
brief exception, as an electoral democracy since its founding in 1947. But Indian
democracy, like sausage-making, does not look very appealing on closer inspection.
The system is rife with corruption and patronage; 34 percent of the winners of
India’s 2014 elections have criminal indictments pending against them, including
serious charges like murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault.
==========
2018 00:21:15
Democracies exist and survive only because people want and are willing to fight for
them; leadership, organizational ability, and oftentimes
==========
2018 00:21:21
Democracies exist and survive only because people want and are willing to fight for
them; leadership, organizational ability, and oftentimes sheer good luck are needed
for them to prevail.
==========
2018 14:37:11
But that’s the nature of a country in transition: something is always being

abandoned while something else is always being built.
==========
A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape From North Korea (Masaji Ishikawa)
11:20:41
The following year, 1959, the Japanese Red Cross Society and the Korean Red Cross
Society secretly negotiated a “Return Agreement” in Calcutta.
==========
11:21:34
That’s one hell of a mass migration. In fact, it was the first (and only) time in
history that so many people from a capitalist country had moved to a socialist
country.
==========
11:22:01
The Japanese government actively promoted the repatriation, supposedly on

humanitarian grounds. But in my opinion, what they were actually pursuing was
opportunism of the most vile and cynical kind. Look at the facts. During the period
of the Japanese Empire, thousands upon thousands of Koreans had been brought to
Japan against their will to serve as slave laborers and, later, cannon fodder. Now,
the government was afraid that these Koreans and their families, discriminated
against and poverty-stricken in the postwar years, might become a source of social
unrest. Sending them back to Korea was a solution to a problem. Nothing more.
==========
11:22:35
So yes, the mass repatriation was great news for both governments—the perfect win-
win situation for everyone except the real human beings involved.
==========
11:30:28
We were shepherded onto buses and taken to reception centers in the city.
==========
11:33:14
He spoke to her softly and tried to calm her down

==========
11:33:21
He spoke to her softly and tried to calm her down as our guide led us down the
road. I looked around at the ramshackle cottages with their thatched roofs
sprinkled with snow. It sounds picturesque. But it wasn’t. It was desolate.
==========
11:47:45
The red stood for the blood of the revolution and the spirit of communism.
==========
11:55:17
From time to time, a hygiene outfit carried out a lice check at school. If you were
dirty, you got told off for poor hygiene. But if you admitted you bathed
frequently, you were equally told off, in this case for “Japanese decadence.” As
usual, you couldn’t win.
==========
11:57:15
the required two rabbit pelts a year. These were

==========
11:59:04
The whole system was based on the “Four Military Lines.” The key tenets were “arm
the entire people,” “fortify the entire nation,” “build a nation of military
leaders,” and “complete military modernization.”
==========
12:49:43
This was laughable, of course, but that’s always the way with totalitarian regimes.
Language gets turned on its head. Serfdom is freedom. Repression is liberation. A
police state is a democratic republic. And we were “the masters of our destiny.”
And if we begged to differ, we were dead.
==========
19:50:41
And then she just laughed. I hadn’t heard her laugh for ages. It was contagious. We
all began to laugh together—until tears sprang to our eyes.
==========
2018 21:12:21
vagrant
==========
2018 15:42:49
I went back to my mother’s resting place. I lit a cigarette and placed it on her
grave instead of incense.
==========
2018 18:12:57
A common slogan at the time was “Communism means rice!” It was repeated all over.
Farm laborers and students worked together to make terraced rice fields on
mountainsides.
==========
2018 19:12:10
But it wasn’t necessary. Everyone was eager to attend, to share their feelings with
others, to feel a part of something larger and more meaningful than their own
pitiful little lives.
==========
2018 20:00:17
After the Korean War, China and North Korea had a “friendship signed in blood” in
which they agreed to a “Border Security Cooperation Protocol.”
==========
The Courage to Be Disliked (Ichiro Kishimi;Fumitake Koga)
- Your Highlight on page 7 | location 97-98 | Added on Sunday, 9 September 2018
21:03:32
All we had to do was obey them and consequently have little to think about. But
religion has lost its power and now there is no real belief in God. With nothing to
rely on, everyone is filled with anxiety and doubt. Everyone is living for
themselves.
==========
- Your Highlight on page 8 | location 115-117 | Added on Monday, 10 September 2018
12:03:45
No, it’s not an illusion. You see, to you, in that moment, the coolness or warmth
of the well water is an undeniable fact. That’s what it means to live in your
subjective world. There is no escape from your own subjectivity. At present, the
world seems complicated and mysterious to you, but if you change, the world will
appear more simple.
==========
12:14:16
Everyone who has grown up abused by his or her parents would have to suffer the
same effects as your friend and become a recluse, or the whole idea just doesn’t
hold water.
==========
12:14:39
If we focus only on past causes and try to explain things solely through cause and
effect, we end up with “determinism.” Because what this says is that our present
and our future have already been decided by past occurrences, and are unalterable.
Am I wrong?
==========
2018 21:35:49
No. This is the difference between etiology (the study of causation) and teleology
(the study of the purpose of a given phenomenon, rather than its cause). Everything
you have been telling me is based in etiology. As long as we stay in etiology, we
will not take a single step forward.
==========
21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Yuval Noah Harari)
- Your Highlight on page 5 | location 75-76 | Added on Tuesday, 11 September 2018
21:38:47
Of course, 7 billion people have 7 billion agendas, and as already noted, thinking
about the big picture is a relatively rare luxury.
==========
21:39:20
A single mother struggling to raise two children in a Mumbai slum is focused on the
next meal; refugees in a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean scan the horizon
for any sign of land; and a dying man in an overcrowded London hospital gathers all
his remaining strength to take in one more breath. They all have far more urgent
problems than global
==========
21:39:26
A single mother struggling to raise two children in a Mumbai slum is focused on the
next meal; refugees in a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean scan the horizon
for any sign of land; and a dying man in an overcrowded London hospital gathers all
his remaining strength to take in one more breath. They all have far more urgent
problems than global warming or the crisis of liberal democracy.
==========
21:53:44
Terrorism works by pressing the fear button deep in our minds and hijacking the
private imagination of millions of individuals. Similarly, the crisis of liberal
democracy is played out not just in parliaments and polling stations, but also in
neurons and synapses.
==========
21:57:18
Our daily routines influence the lives of people and animals halfway across the
world, and some personal gestures can unexpectedly set the entire world ablaze, as
happened with the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, which ignited the
Arab Spring, and with the women who shared their stories of sexual harassment and
sparked the #MeToo movement.
==========
21:58:22
At the close of the twentieth century it appeared that the great ideological
battles between fascism, communism and liberalism resulted in the overwhelming
victory of liberalism. Democratic politics, human rights and free-market capitalism
seemed destined to conquer the entire world. But as usual, history took an
unexpected turn, and after fascism and communism collapsed, now liberalism is in a
jam.
==========
21:59:08
The merger of infotech and biotech might soon push billions of humans out of the
job market and undermine both liberty and equality. Big Data algorithms might
create digital dictatorships in which all power is concentrated in the hands of a
tiny elite while most people suffer not from exploitation, but from something far
worse – irrelevance.
==========
21:59:38
My interest here is less in the eventual creation of inorganic life, and more in
the threat to the welfare state and to particular institutions such as the European
Union.
==========
22:01:54
Perhaps the answer is to reverse the process of globalisation, and re-empower the
nation state?
==========
22:05:30
This may sound overambitious, but Homo sapiens cannot wait. Philosophy, religion
and science are all running out of time. People have debated the meaning of life
for thousands of years. We cannot continue this debate indefinitely.
==========
2018 22:09:30
Therefore, when examining the new challenges that lie ahead of us, it is necessary
to understand the limitations of liberal democracy, and to explore how we can adapt
and improve its current institutions.
==========
2018 22:10:11
As an author, I was therefore required to make a difficult choice. Should I speak

my mind openly, risking that my words could be taken out of context and used to
justify burgeoning autocracies? Or should I censor myself?
==========
2018 22:12:26
Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers or equations, and the simpler
the story, the better.
==========
2018 22:12:44
But during the twentieth century the global elites in New York, London, Berlin and
Moscow formulated three grand stories that claimed to explain the whole past and to
predict the future of the entire world: the fascist story, the communist story, and
the liberal story.
==========
2018 22:15:06
the liberal story.
==========
2018 22:15:16
the liberal story. The Second
==========
2018 22:15:24
the liberal story.
==========
2018 22:15:29
Then the communist story collapsed, and the liberal story remained the dominant
guide to the human past and the indispensable manual for the future of the world –
or so it seemed to the global elite.
==========
2018 22:15:59
It says that for thousands of years humankind lived under oppressive regimes which
allowed people few political rights, economic opportunities or personal liberties,
and which heavily restricted the movements of individuals, ideas and goods. But
people fought for their freedom, and step by step, liberty gained ground.
Democratic regimes took the place of brutal dictatorships. Free enterprise overcame
economic restrictions.
==========
2018 22:17:16
The liberal story acknowledges that not all is well in the world, and that there
are still many hurdles to overcome.
==========
2018 22:17:59
we just continue to liberalise and globalise our political and economic systems, we
will produce peace and prosperity for all.1
==========
2018 22:18:24
Countries that join this unstoppable march of progress will be rewarded with peace
and prosperity sooner. Countries that try to resist the inevitable will suffer the
consequences, until they too see the light, open their borders and liberalise their
societies, their politics and their markets.
==========
2018 22:19:03
However, since the global financial crisis of 2008 people all over the world have
become increasingly disillusioned with the liberal story.
==========
2018 22:19:54
The year 2016 – marked by the Brexit vote in Britain and the rise of Donald Trump
in the United States – signified the moment when this tidal wave of disillusionment
reached the core liberal states of western Europe and North America.
==========
2018 22:20:35
Others have concluded (rightly or wrongly) that liberalisation and globalisation

are a huge racket empowering a tiny elite at the expense of the masses.
==========
2018 22:21:40
To have one story is the most reassuring situation of all. Everything is perfectly
clear. To be suddenly left without any story is terrifying.
==========
2018 22:22:05
Like a person imagining that a bad headache signifies a terminal brain tumor, many
liberals fear that Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump portend the end of human
civilisation.
==========
2018 22:23:07
Already today, computers have made the financial

==========
2018 22:23:13
Already today, computers have made the financial system so complicated that few
humans can understand it. As AI improves, we might soon reach a point when no human
can make sense of finance any more.
==========
2018 22:28:58
In the past, we humans have learned to control the world outside us, but we had
very little control over the world inside us. We knew how to build a dam and stop a
river from flowing, but we did not know how to stop the body from ageing.
==========
2018 22:29:24
The revolutions in biotech and infotech will give us control of the world inside
us, and will enable us to engineer and manufacture
==========
2018 22:29:30
The revolutions in biotech and infotech will give us control of the world inside
us, and
==========
2018 22:29:52
Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely. It is
easier to manipulate a river by building a dam across it than it is to predict all
the complex consequences this will have for the wider ecological system.
==========
- Your Note on page 16 | location 235 | Added on Tuesday, 11 September 2018
22:30:58
Have a moment of thought about the unintended consequences

==========
2018 22:46:14
The revolutions in biotech and infotech are made by engineers, entrepreneurs and
scientists who are hardly aware of the political implications of their decisions,
and who certainly don’t represent anyone.
==========
2018 22:47:53
Ordinary people may not understand artificial intelligence and biotechnology, but
they can sense that the future is passing them by.
==========
2018 00:13:22
In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant. Lots of mysterious words
are bandied around excitedly in TED talks, government think tanks and hi-tech
conferences – globalisation, blockchain, genetic engineering, artificial
intelligence, machine learning – and common people may well suspect that none of
these words are about them.
==========
2018 00:14:31
The Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital for
the economy, but who lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were
supported by many people who still enjoyed political power, but who feared that
they were losing their economic worth.
==========
2018 00:15:55
the days following the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo it turned out
that the great powers believed in imperialism far more than in liberalism, and
instead of uniting the world through free and peaceful commerce they focused on
conquering a bigger slice of the globe by brute force.
==========
2018 00:16:23
Allegedly, the unprecedented butchery had taught humankind the terrible price of
imperialism, and now humanity was finally ready to create a new world order based
on the principles of freedom and peace.
==========
2018 00:51:18
The supermarket proved to be far stronger than the Gulag.

==========
2018 00:51:36
In particular, the liberal story learned from communism to expand the circle of
empathy and to value equality alongside liberty.
==========
2018 00:54:50
As the circle of liberty expanded, the liberal story also came to recognise the
importance of communist-style welfare programmes.
==========
2018 00:55:17
Even the ultra-capitalist USA has realised that the protection of liberty requires
at least some government welfare services. Starving children have no liberties.
==========
2018 00:56:37
Most people who voted for Trump and Brexit didn’t reject the liberal package in its
entirety – they lost faith mainly in its globalising part. They still believe in
democracy, free markets, human rights and social responsibility, but they think
these fine ideas can stop at the border.
==========
2018 00:57:56
Russia does offer an alternative model to liberal democracy, but this model is not
a coherent political ideology. Rather, it is a political practice in which a number
of oligarchs monopolise most of a country’s wealth and power, and then use their
control of the media to hide their activities and cement their rule.
==========
2018 00:58:39
‘you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time,
but you cannot fool all the people all the time’.
==========
2018 01:08:05
If a government is corrupt and fails to improve people’s lives, enough citizens

will eventually realise this and replace the government. But government control of
the media undermines Lincoln’s logic, because it prevents citizens from realising
the truth.
==========
2018 01:08:28
By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong

its rule indefinitely.
==========
2018 01:10:50
At the end of the day, humankind won’t abandon the liberal story, because it
doesn’t have any alternative. People may give the system an angry kick in the
stomach but, having nowhere else to go, they will eventually come back.
==========
2018 01:12:08
Maybe each country should adopt a different idiosyncratic path, defined by its own
ancient traditions? Perhaps even Westerners should take a break from trying to run
the world, and focus on their own affairs for a change?
==========
2018 01:21:39
Chinese elites have rediscovered their native imperial and Confucian legacies, as a
supplement or even substitute for the doubtful Marxist ideology they imported from
the West.
==========
2018 01:23:44
Obama has rightly pointed out that despite the numerous shortcomings of the liberal
package, it has a much better record than any of its alternatives.
==========
2018 01:25:35
Or perhaps the time has come to make a clean break with the past, and craft a
completely new story that goes beyond not just the old gods and nations, but even
the core modern values of liberty and equality?
==========
2018 01:26:38
The revolutions in information technology and biotechnology are still in their

infancy, and it is debatable to what extent they are really responsible for the
current crisis of liberalism.
==========
2018 11:40:43
Luddite
==========
2018 11:41:00
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, for every job lost to a machine
at least one new job was created, and the average standard of living has increased
dramatically.
==========
2018 11:42:32
It turned out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from
some mysterious free will, but rather from billions of neurons calculating
probabilities within a split second. Vaunted ‘human intuition’ is in reality
‘pattern recognition’.
==========
2018 11:46:10
Two particularly important non-human abilities that AI possesses are connectivity

and updateability.
==========
2018 11:47:07
Self-driving cars, in contrast, can all be connected to one another. When two such
vehicles approach the same junction, they are not really two separate entities –
they are part of a single algorithm.
==========
2018 11:47:47
These potential advantages of connectivity and updateability are so huge that at

least in some lines of work it might make sense to replace all humans with
computers, even if individually some humans still do a better job than the
machines.
==========
2018 11:49:13
AI doctors could provide far better and cheaper healthcare for billions of people,
particularly for those who currently receive no healthcare at all. Thanks to
learning algorithms and biometric sensors, a poor villager in an underdeveloped
country might come to enjoy far better healthcare via her smartphone than the
richest person in the world gets today from the most advanced urban hospital.
==========
2018 11:50:22
After all, what we ultimately ought to protect is humans – not jobs.

==========
2018 13:25:06
The inputs are the mathematical patterns of sound waves, and the outputs are the
electrochemical patterns of neural storms.
==========
2018 13:26:45
You might object that the AI would thereby kill serendipity and lock us inside a
narrow musical cocoon, woven by our previous likes and dislikes. What about
exploring new musical tastes and styles? No problem. You could easily adjust the
algorithm to make 5 per cent of its choices completely at random, unexpectedly
throwing at you a recording of an Indonesian Gamelan ensemble, a Rossini opera, or
the latest K-pop hit.
==========
2018 13:31:57
If beauty is indeed in the ears of the listener, and if the customer is always
right, then biometric algorithms stand a chance of producing the best art in
history.
==========
2018 13:34:58
In 2015 the US Air Force lacked sufficient trained humans to fill all these
positions, and therefore faced an ironic crisis in manning its unmanned aircraft.
==========
2018 13:35:06
If so, the job market of 2050 might well be characterised by human–AI cooperation
rather than competition.
==========
2018 13:37:00
During previous waves of automation, people could usually switch from one routine
low-skill job to another. In 1920 a farm worker laid off due to the mechanisation
of agriculture could find a new job in a factory producing tractors. In 1980 an
unemployed factory worker could start working as a cashier in a supermarket. Such
occupational changes were feasible, because the move from the farm to the factory
and from the factory to the supermarket required only limited retraining.
==========
2018 13:44:39
At least in chess, creativity is already the trademark of computers rather than

humans!
==========
2018 13:46:36
Change is always stressful, and the hectic world of the early twenty-first century
has produced a global epidemic of stress.21
==========
2018 13:50:04
Feudalism, monarchism and traditional religions were not adapted to managing

industrial metropolises, millions of uprooted workers, or the constantly changing
nature of the modern economy. Consequently humankind had to develop completely new
models – liberal democracies, communist dictatorships and fascist regimes – and it
took more than a century of terrible wars and revolutions to experiment with these
models, separate the wheat from the chaff, and implement the best solutions.
==========
2018 13:52:40
Nevertheless, governments might decide to deliberately slow down the pace of

automation, in order to lessen the resulting shocks and allow time for
readjustments. Technology is never deterministic, and the fact that something can
be done does not mean it must be done. Government regulation can successfully block
new technologies even if they are commercially viable and economically lucrative.
==========
2018 13:55:12
Slowing down the pace of change may give us time to create enough new jobs to
replace most of the losses. Yet as noted earlier, economic entrepreneurship will
have to be accompanied by a revolution in education and psychology. Assuming that
the new jobs won’t be just government sinecures, they will probably demand high
levels of expertise, and as AI continues to improve, human employees will need to
repeatedly learn new skills and change their profession.
==========
2018 13:55:52
Yet even if enough government help is forthcoming, it is far from clear whether
billions of people could repeatedly reinvent themselves without losing their mental
balance.
==========
2018 13:56:50
As automation threatens to shake the capitalist system to its foundation, one might
suppose that communism could make a comeback. But communism was not built to
exploit that kind of crisis.
==========
2018 13:57:39
The communist political plan called for a working-class revolution. How relevant
will these teachings be if the masses lose their economic value, and therefore need
to struggle against irrelevance rather than against exploitation? How do you start
a working-class revolution without a working class?
==========
2018 13:58:13
Some may argue that humans could never become economically irrelevant, because even
if they cannot compete with AI in the workplace, they will always be needed as
consumers.
==========
2018 13:59:35
Similarly in the advertisement business, the most important customer of all is an

algorithm: the Google search algorithm. When people design Web pages, they often
cater to the taste of the Google search algorithm rather than to the taste of any
human being.
==========
2018 15:10:23
income. Alternatively, governments could subsidise universal basic services rather

==========
2018 15:10:29
Alternatively, governments could subsidise universal basic services rather than

income. Instead of giving money to people, who then shop around for whatever they
want, the government might subsidise free education, free healthcare, free
transport and so forth.
==========
2018 15:10:35

transport and so forth. This is in fact the utopian vision of communism. Though the
communist plan to start a working-class revolution might well become
==========
2018 15:10:40

transport and so forth. This is in fact the utopian vision of communism. Though the
communist plan to start a working-class revolution might well become
==========
2018 15:10:53

transport and so forth.
==========
2018 15:11:12

transport and so forth. This is in fact the utopian vision of communism.
==========
2018 15:12:59
It is debatable whether it is better to provide people with universal basic income

(the capitalist paradise) or universal basic services (the communist paradise).
==========
2018 15:20:31
If biotechnology enables parents to upgrade their children, would this be
considered a basic human need, or would we see humankind splitting into different
biological castes, with rich superhumans enjoying abilities that far surpass those
of poor Homo sapiens?
==========
2018 15:24:02
Israel. There, about 50% of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men never work. They dedicate
their lives to studying holy scriptures and performing religious rituals.
==========
September 2018 15:30:22
dragoman
==========
September 2018 15:34:42
The deeper we penetrated into the Sahara, the more time slowed down for me; it even
threatened to move backward. The shimmering heat waves rising up contributed a good
deal to my dreamy state, and when we reached the first palms and dwellings of the
oasis, it seemed to me that everything here was exactly the way it should be and
the way it had always been. Early the next morning I was awakened
==========
September 2018 15:35:00
The deeper we penetrated into the Sahara, the more time slowed down for me; it even
threatened to move backward. The shimmering heat waves rising up contributed a good
deal to my dreamy state, and when we reached the first palms and dwellings of the
oasis, it seemed to me that everything here was exactly the way it should be and
the way it had always been.
==========
September 2018 15:40:01
This scene taught me something: these people live from their affects, are moved and
have their being in emotions. Their consciousness takes care of their orientation
in space and transmits impressions from outside, and it is also stirred by inner
impulses and affects.
==========
September 2018 15:40:30
The situation is not so different with the European; but we are, after all,
somewhat more complicated. At any rate the European possesses a certain measure of
will and directed intention. What we lack is intensity of
==========
September 2018 15:40:41
The situation is not so different with the European; but we are, after all,
somewhat more complicated. At any rate the European possesses a certain measure of
will and directed intention. What we lack is intensity of life.
==========
2018 14:43:28
But should it appear to us again in the form of a conflict, then we should keep it
in our consciousness and test the two possibilities against each other—the life we
live and the one we have forgotten. For what has apparently been lost does not come
to the fore again without sufficient reason.
==========
2018 16:40:51
That is to say, it is all purposeful and has meaning. But because consciousness
never has a view of the whole, it usually cannot understand this meaning. We must
therefore content ourselves for the time being with noting the phenomenon and
hoping that the future, or further investigation, will reveal the significance
==========
2018 16:40:57
That is to say, it is all purposeful and has meaning. But because consciousness
never has a view of the whole, it usually cannot understand this meaning. We must
therefore content ourselves for the time being with noting the phenomenon and
hoping that the future, or further investigation, will reveal the significance of
this clash with the shadow of the self.
==========
2018 16:41:26
We always require an outside point to stand on, in order to apply the lever of
criticism. This is especially so in psychology, where by the nature of the material
we are much more subjectively involved than in any other science.
==========
2018 16:44:04
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of

ourselves.
==========
2018 16:47:27
At the same time, one never knows which is more enjoyable: catching sight of new
shores, or discovering new approaches to age-old knowledge that has been almost
forgotten.
==========
2018 18:09:18
Preservation of the secret gives the Pueblo Indian pride and the power to resist
the dominant whites.
==========
2018 18:09:50
In ordinary life he shows a degree of self-control and dignity that borders on

fatalistic equanimity. But when he speaks of things that pertain to his mysteries,
he is in the grip of a surprising emotion which he cannot conceal—a fact which
greatly helped to satisfy my curiosity.
==========
2018 18:10:22
Their religious conceptions are not theories to them (which, indeed, would have to
be very curious theories to evoke tears from a man), but facts, as important and
moving as the corresponding external realities.
==========
2018 18:15:51
Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in
which we were once at home by right of birth.
==========
2018 18:52:05
Especially in the United States, both Republicans and Democrats should occasionally
take a break from their heated quarrels to remind themselves that they all agree on
fundamentals such as free elections, an independent judiciary, and human rights.
==========
2018 19:29:28
However, for better or worse, elections and referendums are not about what we
think. They are about what we feel.
==========
2018 19:33:03
For thousands of years people believed that authority came from divine laws rather
than from the human heart, and that we should therefore sanctify the word of God
rather than human liberty. Only in the last few centuries did the source of
authority shift from celestial deities to flesh-and-blood humans.
==========
2018 19:33:42
Feelings aren’t based on intuition, inspiration or freedom – they are based on

calculation.
==========
12:17:47
Feelings are thus not the opposite of rationality

==========
12:17:51
Feelings are thus not the opposite of rationality – they embody evolutionary
rationality.
==========
12:20:20
apparatchik.
==========
2018 13:48:41
The word television comes from Greek ‘tele’, which means ‘far’, and Latin ‘visio’,
sight.
==========
2018 13:50:39
Even more than algorithms, humans suffer from insufficient data, from faulty
programming (genetic and cultural), from muddled definitions, and from the chaos of
life.
==========
2018 13:51:51
Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst political system in the
world, except for all the others.
==========
2018 13:55:49
Every year millions of youngsters need to decide what to study at university. This
is a very important and very difficult decision. You are under pressure from your
parents, your friends and your teachers, who have different interests and opinions.
You also have your own fears and fantasies to deal with. Your judgement is clouded
and manipulated by Hollywood blockbusters, trashy novels, and sophisticated
advertising campaigns. It is particularly difficult to make a wise decision because
you do not really know what it takes to succeed in different professions, and you
don’t necessarily have a realistic image of your own strengths and weaknesses. What
does it take to succeed as a lawyer? How do I perform under pressure? Am I a good
team-worker?
==========
2018 13:58:54
But once we begin to count on AI to decide what to study, where to work, and who to
marry, human life will cease to be a drama of decision-making. Democratic elections
and free markets will make little sense. So would most religions and works of art.
==========
2018 14:03:37
Up till now, these arguments have had embarrassingly little impact on actual
behaviour, because in times of crisis humans all too often forget about their
philosophical views and follow their emotions and gut instincts instead.
==========
2018 14:04:42
The moral of the parable is that people’s merit should be judged by their actual
behaviour, rather than by their religious affiliaton.
==========
2018 14:06:00
How many Christians actually turn the other cheek, how many Buddhists actually rise
above egoistic obsessions, and how many Jews actually love their neighbours as
themselves?
==========
2018 14:07:33
emotions to quickly make life and death decisions. We have inherited our anger, our
fear and our lust from millions of ancestors, all of whom passed the most rigorous
quality control tests of natural selection.
==========
2018 14:07:46
We have inherited our anger, our fear and our lust from millions of ancestors, all
of whom passed the most rigorous quality control tests of natural selection.
==========
2018 14:08:32
Distracted, angry and anxious human drivers kill more than a million people in
traffic accidents every year. We can send all our philosophers, prophets and
priests to preach ethics to these drivers – but on the road, mammalian emotions and
savannah instincts will still take over.
==========
2018 14:08:52
Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill and John Rawls can sit in some cosy university hall
and discuss theoretical problems in ethics for days – but would their conclusions
actually be implemented by stressed-out
==========
2018 14:08:59
Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill and John Rawls can sit in some cosy university hall
and discuss theoretical problems in ethics for days – but would their conclusions
actually be implemented by stressed-out drivers caught in a split-second emergency?
==========
2018 14:15:17
For an extremely insightful discussion, see Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math

Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York:
Crown, 2016). This is really an obligatory read for anyone interested in the
potential effects of algorithms on society and politics.
==========
2018 14:17:14
If more people buy the Tesla Egoist, you won’t be able to blame Tesla for that.
After all, the customer is always right.
==========
2018 14:26:43
Nicknamed ‘the start-up nation’, Israel has an extremely vibrant hi-tech sector,
and a cutting-edge cyber-security industry. At the same time it is also locked into
a deadly conflict with the Palestinians, and at least some of its leaders, generals
and citizens might well be happy to create a total surveillance regime in the West
Bank as soon as they have the necessary technology.
==========
2018 14:32:42
Given twentieth-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much

information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all the
information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is part of the reason
why the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the
Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy.
==========
2018 14:34:27
If you concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one

database, disregarding all privacy concerns, you can train much better algorithms
than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial
information on a million people.
==========
2018 14:35:56
Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech.
Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form, or
humans will come to live in ‘digital dictatorships’.
==========
2018 15:07:29
Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel

things such as pain, joy, love and anger.
==========
2018 15:09:17
Just as airplanes fly faster than birds without ever developing feathers, so
computers may come to solve problems much better than mammals without ever
developing feelings.
==========
2018 15:13:47
The economic system pressures me to expand and diversify my investment portfolio,

but it gives me zero incentives to expand and diversify my compassion.
==========
2018 15:16:47
was enchanted by this sight—it was a picture of something utterly alien and outside
my experience, but on the other hand a most intense sentiment du déjà vu. I had the
feeling that I had already experienced this moment and had always known this world
which was separated from me only by distance in time. It was as if I were this
moment returning to the land of my youth, and as if I knew that dark-skinned man
who had been waiting for me for five thousand years.
==========

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The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (Jonas Jonasson)

- Your Highlight on page 3 | location 36-36 | Added on Monday, 3 April 2017

They say if you want to master something, teach it.

Our culture has become stationary.

Women are turned on by being wanted, by being desired.

By investment I mean the degree in which you sacrifice/alter your own

Daniel’s story is a quintessential example of why pick up lines, routines, value

Both derive from a fundamental insecurity.

The persona is actually a front, an act, a compensation, an emotional acting out

all people eventually return to their baseline levels of investment.

vulnerability represents a form of power, a deep and subtle form of power.

walking the tight-rope of pursuing her

honestly demonstrating your interest in a woman short-circuits this issue. It’s a

You can’t fake vulnerability and you can’t fake honesty.

I don’t use my compliments as a bargaining tool. I give them genuinely.

The importance of therapy is to remember that it’s a tool, not a solution.

They will accuse you of being demanding, overbearing, horny, untrustworthy, or

It’s not practice if she’s not hot, it’s desperation.

the Three Fundamentals are interdependent

your life and everything that it encompasses, is a reflection of your emotional

Art has a higher purpose than entertainment. “The

Poor lifestyle choices reflect a lack of investment in yourself, which in turn

There’s a certain baseline level of independence and self-sufficiency that your

What’s important is that you move things forward without hesitation…

Blame is yet another form of investment and neediness.

if you wish to improve at anything is to take full responsibility and

sub-communicating to everyone is in fact, how insanely high invested you are in

“What you resist will persist.”

Everybody on this planet shares a handful of universal emotional realities:

It’s like being a psychic without the cheesiness.

Communication is always up for interpretation, therefore there’s always going to be

the best communicators you know are fantastic story-tellers.

lay bathed in glowing sunset reds.

Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations:

Physical pain is a product of our nervous system, a feedback mechanism to give us a

Like physical pain, our psychological pain is an indication of something out of

Happiness comes from solving problems.

Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant

This flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism

But what he found when he returned to Japan horrified him: a consumerist,

Constant positivity is a form of avoidance, not a valid solution to life’s problems

“With great responsibility comes great power.”

the short guy wanting to

“outrage porn”: rather than report on real stories and

Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we learn something new, we don’t go

Aristotle wrote, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a

KFC bucket full of Rubik’s Cubes.

The Denial of Death,

Confronting the reality of our own mortality is important because it obliterates

dizzying staircases of rice paddies;

transmogrifications are entirely prescribed by Einstein’s most famous equation: E =

English referred to such laborers as “coolies”—from the Chinese kuli, or “bitter

The city is all steps and legs.

erhu, played well, makes haunting music.

a case in which words and meaning had parted company.

Chinese classics by heart—the verses of Du Fu, of Li Bai, of Qu Yuan—and

Chinese classics by heart—the verses of Du Fu, of Li Bai, of Qu Yuan—and

Chinese classics by heart—the verses of Du Fu, of Li Bai, of Qu Yuan—and

She looks like a floating poem.

Lao Da—Big Brother,

Miao Ze in the Chinese classic The Romance of the Three Kingdoms,

resounded with sweet regularity as we recited them aloud—iambic

resounded with sweet regularity as we recited them aloud—iambic