[E]conomists’ vision of ‘perfect competition’ – in which the social role of virtue in serving the public economic interest is rendered redundant by the incentives competition generates in a market – might work tolerably in the market for vegetables. But it doesn’t in more sophisticated markets like those for knowledge and expertise.
--Nicholas Gruen, economist (@NGruen1)
It is also important to present a powerful image, to conjure a “glamour” of success. “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular,” and Trump’s job is to tell them it is. They will do the rest. He conveys this message by surrounding himself with symbols of the fantasy life he is selling.
But things are not quite so simple as that. To begin with, people may have a motive for deceiving themselves and each other. Where certain things which may happen in people’s minds are conventionally regarded with disapproval, the lengths to which people in whose minds they actually do happen will go, in order to persuade themselves and others that they do not happen, are most remarkable.
The only way to eat a satiating meal while minimizing insulin secretion is to add fat. It’s the one macronutrient that does not stimulate an insulin response.
The masses can never successfully revolt until they acquire a leadership, which is always made up in part of able and ambitious individuals from their own ranks who cannot gain entrance into the governing élite, and in part of disgruntled members of the existing élite (members of the nobility, for example, in the opening stages of the French Revolution, or dissatisfied intellectuals and middle-class persons in the Russian Revolution). So long, therefore, as the governing élite is both willing and in a position to destroy or to assimilate all such individuals, it has a virtual guarantee against internal revolution.
“The scientists who discovered the forces of electricity,” Barfield contends, “actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness of their relationship with one another.”
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