We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.
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Cultures contain many cues and inducements to dissuade the individual from approaching ultimate limits, in much the same way that read more
Cultures contain many cues and inducements to dissuade the individual from approaching ultimate limits, in much the same way that a special warning strip of land around the edge of a baseball field lets a player know that he is about to run into a concrete wall when he is preoccupied with catching the ball. The wider that strip of land and the more sensitive the player is to the changing composition of the ground under his feet as he pursues the ball, the more effective the warning. Romanticizing or lionizing as "individualistic" those people who disregard social cues and inducements increases the danger of head-on collisions with inherent social limits. Decrying various forms of social disapproval is in effect narrowing the warning strip.
...everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established read more
...everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established social organization becomes a vested-interest institution more concerned with its efforts to maintain itself or advance its own interests than to achieve the purpose that society expects it to achieve.
The nature of a society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flow--by the tilt of read more
The nature of a society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flow--by the tilt of the social landscape.
Problems are only opportunities in work clothes.
Problems are only opportunities in work clothes.
Adversity is the first path to truth. - Don Juan.
Adversity is the first path to truth. - Don Juan.
If you pray hard enough, water will run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of read more
If you pray hard enough, water will run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of course!
Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which read more
Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition.
You cannot criticize the New Testament. It criticizes you.
You cannot criticize the New Testament. It criticizes you.
