The primary source
of violence in human affairs is when one’s existence comes up
against another’s set of purposes.
The culture of
stupidity of our leaders has been very carefully cultivated by their
benefactors.
Be open to
everything language has to offer.
We have more
invested in the reiteration of our own sanctimony than in alleviating
the suffering of other people.
As useful as it is,
research can also be a form of numbing.
We try to keep the
facts on our side, as if that will protect us, somehow, from all the
deep hurt.
The facts are
inadequate for our purposes however vital they may be for our
self-confidence.
The fundamental
problem of human progress is and always has been that those who
already have the power to change society owe that power to the status
quo.
The truth is that
there is no end state, no outcome, only the temporary cessation of a
task, the momentary manifestation of a phase.
The internet and the
worship hall have this in common: they are where we go to have our
assumptions reinforced.
When your sense of
hope relies on another’s despair, you’re doing it wrong.
Education isn’t
learning facts about things; it’s using ideas in order to learn
what to do with facts about things.
A tradition is a bad
idea that refuses to die.
You develop a taste
for ideas the same way you do for art, music, literature, fine food.
This taste can—and should—be cultivated as a matter of becoming
an educated person. If not, you’re not really engaging in your
education, formal or otherwise, no matter what you may call it.
Character isn’t
about always doing the right thing; it’s about having the humility
to learn and change from having done things wrong.
There is a certain
type of professional who always takes care to move the experiences of
those he serves out of the equation in order to make room for his own
ego.
One reason we don’t
change is that, while failure can garner sympathy, change can
threaten identity.
Businesses are fine,
and we may even need them. But they’re not enough. The main
business of a democracy must always be equity.
Framing government
as a business and the taxpayer as a customer is misleading: in order
to achieve “the general welfare,” we must see government as a
means to create a common good, and our duties as citizens as
contributions to a society worth living in.
We’ve been taught
that tears are punishment for being sad. They’re really what we’ve
earned for the privilege of being human.
It’s possible that
the idea of a comprehensible universe is an artifact of the human
mind, a necessary folly, a reassuring delusion masking fretful,
cosmological chaos.
Poetry is primary
research into what’s most basic and irreducible about being alive.
Privilege is the
power to give your personal fears the force of law.
Our very systems of
sorting and ordering data create both insights and cognitive
impairments. We tend to forget the filter is there and take to
assuming the world really does align with the tools we use to study
it.
We’ll recover from
the lies, but we’ll never fully recover from all the lying.
It’s a strange
quirk of Western thought that the past is seen as the child of the
present and the future as the father of now. A more accurate picture
would reverse this order. The past, rather than being “primitive”
or “innocent,” creates the world we’re emerging into, frames
what discovery means for us, and is the very vehicle of all our
current explorations.
The thing is the
thing; the system is cognitive.
Good literature
makes you think and feel; great literature changes the manner in
which you think and feel.
For the competitors,
the purpose of competition within a market is not to innovate or
create efficiencies—still less is it to create jobs. The purpose is
to win market share. In other words, the purpose of competition, no
matter its means, is to reduce competition by reducing the number of
competitors.
There are two ways
to experience change: go somewhere or stay put.
Maintaining an
identity is more important than addressing an injustice that does us
harm.
A successful system
of hierarchical power succeeds by rendering evil banal.
I often hear people
excuse not reading poetry by claiming that they do not understand it.
Do they really think they’ll understand it better by not reading
it?
Problematic are not
the questions you can’t answer but the ones you can’t ask.
We should first
admit that we can’t possibly understand another person’s pain.
But then we should do all we can to make space for it.
It’s funny with
madness: the sane will ask “why” not because they want to know
but because they want to be seen as the sort of people who ask “why.”
The mad ask expecting an answer.
Contemporary
conservatism: society exists to produce goods for an economy.
Classical liberalism: an economy exists to produce goods for a
society.
An irony: we feel
safe within our own spheres of fear.
The expert, the
businessman, th evaluator, the executive are motivated by what they
know. The scholar, the artist, the scientist, the philosopher are
motivated by what they do not know. This is why our current rush
toward business models and toward reliance on existing evidence bases
is so pernicious to the university, to creativity, and to science. We
have subjugated scholarship to service delivery, artistry to
marketing, science to research and evaluation.
Analytical
spellbinding: the idea that a clever analysis equates with a complete
understanding.
Analytical hegemony:
the projection of an analysis or analytical framework into the world
as an intervention or the solution to a problem.
The point of
ambition is power, but art is impossible without humbling oneself to
the task at hand.
Our assumptions form
the main barriers to our understanding.
--Lael Ewy
