Purpose is whatever you say it is when you wake up in the morning. And purpose doesn’t carry over all by itself from day to day. You have to create it fresh when you wake up.
My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.
Sextus Empiricus shows the fallibility of induction continuing to be a live issue in philosophy. It would be a mistake, he says, to suppose that because most animals eat by moving the lower jaw, all do, since the crocodile moves the upper jaw.
Yet they all agree, whether they state it explicitly or not, that we should avoid highly processed grains and sugar and sugary beverages (and, implicitly, alcoholic beverages like beer), which are the most fattening of the carbohydrates by our understanding of insulin dynamics.
“In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”
The solidarity of mankind may well turn out to be an unbearable burden, and it is not surprising that the common reactions to it are political apathy, isolationist nationalism, or desperate rebellion against all powers that be rather than enthusiasm or a desire for a revival of humanism. The idealism of the humanist tradition of enlightenment and its concept of mankind look like reckless optimism in the light of present realities.
Where a lawyer or auditor might stretch the truth without telling any lies, marketing and advertising frequently bypass our rational faculties altogether, drawing us into a world of affect and fantasy.
--Nicholas Gruen
The Second World War transformed Keynesian economics as a profession, winning the doctrine an unexpected set of institutional allies in what Dwight D. Eisenhower would eventually label the “military-industrial complex.” Keynesian ideas, which had been developed explicitly to combat “militarism,” became essential to the maintenance of a permanently militarized world.
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