The essence of professionalism is the focus upon the work and its demands, while we are doing it, to the exclusion of all else.
We must reinvent civilization so that it once again rests on a moral foundation by discovering a new “rule of life” that moderates, rather than magnifies, the five great ills.
While we can’t simply decide when to slow or speed up our heart or digestion, or to move blood from one organ to another, we can choose how and when to breathe.
The tricky thing about understanding the Wedge, and what makes it so incredibly difficult to explain, is that you—or rather, your ego—is not always the thing in charge. Remember, there is no self. All the parts of an individual and environment work together to generate an illusion of a self. Ego is just a perspective on the reality that we’re part of a superorganism.
To do that [compete in democracy], conservatives would have to accept a politics of contested authority and endless argument. They would have to fight for control within a framework of government that liberals favored. That liberal framework included parliamentary sovereignty, wider franchise, and civic equality. It gave body to the core liberal ideals of limited power and equal respect.
