Simply stopping the slide— just keeping things from getting worse— isn’t enough. Reversing it means aggressively addressing our world’s agonizing social and economic injustices; and most importantly, it means rebuilding nature. We must commit to fixing the hideous environmental mess we’ve made— with all the science, technology, economic investment, and intellectual, artistic, and emotional creativity we can muster.
Those values and rules and institutions do for knowledge what the U.S. Constitution does for politics: they create a governing structure, forcing social contestation onto peaceful and productive pathways. And so I call them, collectively, the Constitution of Knowledge.
Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only his failure.
The internet has been excellent at telling us about the actual, not so much about the contingent, although policymakers necessarily operate in an arena of uncertainty and unpredictability.
“Nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations [read, today: Russia?] and passionate attachments for others [read, perhaps: South Vietnam?] should be excluded.” Washington’s text argues that “the nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.”
This was published in 1970, perhaps we'd substitute "China" for "Russia," and perhaps "Saudia Arabia."
This is what happened: First your society and your culture taught you to believe that you would not be happy without certain persons and certain things. Just take a look around you: Everywhere people have actually built their lives on the unquestioned belief that without certain things—money, power, success, approval, a good reputation, love, friendship, spirituality, God—they cannot be happy. What is your particular combination?
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