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Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

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Ken Breniman

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“For example, regions in the Americas that were well suited to cash crops that required intensive farming and benefited from large pools of labour became places with high levels of inequality and limited distribution of rights among the population. Locations better suited to less intensive forms of agricultural production on the other hand - regions that favoured the growing of wheat, for example - proved to be more egalitarian, with better distribution of rights among the population. The short explanation for this is that crops that required lower labour input produced smaller profits and therefore meant there was less to fight over, and more reason to co-operate. This is one of the reasons why it is possible to identify a strong relationship between a country's socio-economic development and its distance from the equator.”

HistoryInequality
Book:The Earth Transformed: An Untold History
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“We are living through an absolutely crucial juncture in human history, when the externalities of our current economic system are coming home to roost. These include misinformation (courtesy of 'Big Tech'), global heating (thanks to 'Big Oil'), and wealth inequality (exacerbated by neoliberal economic policies). Together, these interlocking crises are buffeting our political institutions, threatening to envelop them in a vortex of partisanship and chronic instability. Looming over these challenges is the threat of societal disruption from AI and the imminent collapse of a rules-based international order. At such a time, what we need more than ever is a big vision, a narrative to help people make sense of the bewildering world we live in, and political courage. Both things that seem distinctly lacking from our political class.”

InequalityGlobal WarmingArtificial IntelligenceMisinformationInstabilityNeoliberalismPolitical Courage
Book:Reforesting Scotland 72: Autumn/Winter 2025
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“Utopianism also finds a receptive audience among the society's disenchanted, disaffected, dissatisfied, and maladjusted who are unwilling or unable to assume responsibility for their own real or perceived conditions but instead blame their surroundings, 'the system,' and others. They are lured by the false hopes and promises of utopian transformation and the criticisms of the existing society, to which their connection is tentative or nonexistent. Improving the malcontent's lot becomes linked to the utopian cause. Moreover, disparaging and diminishing the successful and accomplished becomes an essential tactic. No one should be better than anyone else, regardless of the merits or values of his contributions. By exploiting human frailties, frustrations, jealousies, and inequities, a sense of meaning and self-worth is created in the malcontent's otherwise unhappy and directionless life. Simply put, equality in misery -- that is, equality of result or conformity -- is advanced as a just, fair, and virtuous undertaking. Liberty, therefore, is inherently immoral, except where it avails equality.”

InequalityUtopianismMalcontents
Book:Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America
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“Equality, as understood by the American Founders, is the natural right of every individual to live freely under self-government, to acquire and retain the property he creates through his own labor, and to be treated impartially before a just law. Moreover, equality should not be confused with perfection, for man is also imperfect, making his application of equality, even in the most just society, imperfect. Otherwise, inequality is the natural state of man in the sense that each individual is born unique in all his human characteristics. Therefore, equality and inequality, properly comprehended, are both engines of liberty.”

LibertyEqualityInequality
Book:Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America
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“What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta (the same boy grown to manhood), who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together.”

DiscriminationInequalityAfricaColonial Society
Book:West with the Night
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“In no country does the average income give the right picture of how people live but in a country with higher inequality it is likely to be particularly misleading. Given that the US has by far the most unequal distribution of income among the rich countries, we can safely guess that the US per capita income overstates the actual living standards of more of its citizens than in other countries....The much higher crime rate than in Europe or Japan -- in per capita terms, the US has eight times more people in prison than Europe and twelve times more than Japan -- shows that there is a far bigger underclass in the US.”

Inequality
Book:23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
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“Soul mates. They really call themselves that, which makes sense, because I guess they are ... They have no harsh edges with each other, no spiny conflicts, they ride though life like conjoined jellyfish - expanding and contracting instinctively, filling each other's spaces liquidly. Making it look easy.”

LoveHappinessPeaceRelationshipsFamilyMarriagePerfectionTrue LoveUnconditional LoveOther HalfSoul MateSoul MatesJellyfishIdeal LoverIdeal Love
Book:Gone Girl
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“In addition to the authoritarian role that U.S. police play by selectively enforcing rules made by those with power in an unequal society, they also have a long history of both overtly supporting and actively being infiltrated by the far right.”

PoliceInequalityOligarchyCopagandaThe Mafia In BluePolice As Soldiers For The ElitePolice In Bed With The Far RightSelective Enforcement
Book:Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
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