Education and Coercion

Education and Coercion

"It may be asked where the number of superior leaders are to come from who are to act as educators, and it may be alarming to think of the enormous amount of coercion that will inevitably be required before these intentions can be carried out." 

 Sigmund Freud.  The Future of an Illusion (1927; Norton, 1961) p. 8.

Globalization shoved ethics to the side

"Globalization had shoved ethics to the side from the very beginning and insisted upon a curious sort of moral righteousness that included maximum trade, unrestrained self-interest, and governments alone respecting their debts. These notions were curiously paired with something often called family values, as well as an Old Testament view of good and evil. It somehow followed that if countries were in financial trouble, they were moral transgressors."  John Ralston Saul. The Collapse of Globalism: and the Rebirth of Nationalism.  2004

Influence, not mostly force

"From Hobbes to Marx and beyond, political theory has largely been written in national and international terms.  Our reflections on the order of society, as well as nature, are still dominated by the Newtonian image of massive power, exerted by sovereign agency through the operation of central force, and we have lost our feeling for all the respects in which social and political achievements depend on influence, more than on force.  For the moment, the varied political relations and interactions between international, subnational and multinational entities, and the functions they can effectively serve, still remain to be analyzed, but an 'ecology of institutions' that has, as yet, scarcely come into existence."Stephen Toulmin.  Cosmopolis:  The Hidden Agenda of Modernity.  Free Press, 1990, 208-209.

 

The US gov't should have 0 (zero) secrets.  A teenage girl has more legitimate secrets than any gov't.  Most of the so-called secrets are to coverup for corrupt and inept (maybe those two words should be fused — incorreption?) officials.  Let's blow the lid off the whole corrupt mess.  I hope there are 50 more of these kind of guys to follow.

"For the individual there is no society unless he has social status and function.  Society is only meaningful if its purpose, its aims and ideals make sense in terms of the individual's purposes, aims, and ideals.  There must be a definite functional relationship between individual life and group life." 

 

Peter Drucker.  The Future of Industrial Man.  p. 29.

"Those who preached Globalization couldn't tell the difference between ethics and morality. Ethics is the measurement of the public good. Morality is the weapon of religious and social righteousness."John Ralston Saul. The Collapse of Globalism: and the Rebirth of Nationalism.  2004

"The incarnation is in itself an unfathomable mystery, but it makes sense of everything else that the New Testament contains." 

J. I. Packer.  Knowing God.  IVP.  1973.  47.

Nothing Outlasts God. The Eternal Present is Timeless

"As nothing outlasts God, so nothing slips away from Him into a past. The later conception (later in Christian thought — Plato had reached it) of the timeless as an eternal present has been achieved."

C. S. Lewis.  Reflections on the Psalms.  NY.  HBJ.  1958.  137.  On Psalm  90. 4.