Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 27 September 2020

 

1984

George Orwell

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it; in Newspeak, “doublethink.”

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

--Ernest Becker

The most fateful consequence of mental time travel may be the understanding that we will all die.

--Michael Corballis

If you know others and know yourself, you’ll not be imperiled in a hundred battles.

--Sun Tzu

It is in the space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, found religions, get locked up or ‘disappeared’ or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.

--Donella Meadows

Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation.

--Rabindranath Tagore

Thoughts of the Day: Saturday 26 September 2020

 

All quotations today (including secondary quotes)  are taken from Commanding Hope by Thomas Homer-Dixon, published earlier this month. 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[T]his new WIT [combination of worldview, institutions, & technology] will also need to incorporate a renovated discipline of economics— one that recognizes that human economies are complex systems intimately connected with nature; that markets won’t automatically find good substitutes for some of the most precious things nature gives us, like moderate temperatures and enough water for our crops; and that economics must be grounded in moral principles attuned to our world’s demanding new material and social realities. And, to top it all off, our alternative economic WIT should avoid the suffocating burden of increasingly complex government regulation, while retaining the technological creativity of modern capitalism within a democratic framework.

Nothing is more frightful than to see ignorance in action.

--Goethe

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its power of acting and reasoning as fear.

--Edmund Burke

Our imagination displays before us the ever-changing picture of the possible. It is with this picture that we incessantly confront what we fear and what we hope.

--Francois Jacob

Science in the service of humanity is technology, but lack of wisdom may make the service harmful.

--Isaac Asimov

Comprehension [means] examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us— neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight.

--Hannah Arendt

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.

--E.O. Wilson

Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope.

--Greta Thunberg

Power over the rules is real power. That’s why lobbyists congregate when Congress writes laws, and why the Supreme Court, which interprets and delineates the Constitution— the rules for writing rules— has even more power than Congress. If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules, and to who has power over them.

--Donella Meadows