[W]e need metaphor or mythos in order to understand the world. Such myths or metaphors are not dispensable luxuries, or ‘optional extras’, still less the means of obfuscation: they are fundamental and essential to the process. We are not given the option not to choose one, and the myth we choose is important: in the absence of anything better, we revert to the metaphor or myth of the machine.
China, as noted many times in these volumes, builds on a two-millennia-long tradition of strong centralized government and is one of the few state-level societies never to have developed an indigenous tradition of rule of law. China’s rich and complex tradition has substituted Confucian morality for formal procedural rules as a constraint on rulers.
Ask most people why they work and they’re likely to answer “To make money.” The Culture Code shows us that this isn’t actually true, but there is a very strong connection between work and money in this culture.
When I speak of action, I shall be referring to that kind of action in which the agent does what he does not because he is in a certain situation, but because he knows or believes himself to be in a certain situation.
"If you are not willing to risk the usual, you will have to settle for the ordinary." – Jim Rohn
And for the deeper dive from Hannah Arendt:
Knowledge and understanding are not the same, but they are interrelated. Understanding is based on knowledge and knowledge cannot proceed without a preliminary, inarticulate understanding. Preliminary understanding denounces totalitarianism as tyranny and has decided that our fight against it is a fight for freedom.
. . . .
Understanding precedes and succeeds knowledge. Preliminary understanding, which is at the basis of all knowledge, and true understanding, which transcends it, have this in common: They make knowledge meaningful. Historical description and political analysis6 can never prove that there is such a thing as the nature or the essence of totalitarian government, simply because there is a nature to monarchical, republican, tyrannical, or despotic government.
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