“If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore.”
“The human brain evolved to work within a strict cultural framework. Our brains and cultural/religious mechanisms co-evolved to work together. Operating our brains in a cultural/religious vacuum is like trying to run a machine without any grease—it will start fritzing and fall to pieces at a much faster rate. When individuals cast off their ancestral cultural/religious frameworks or make up new ones out of whole cloth without carefully investigating the instrumental roles cultural practices play, is it any surprise that they find themselves barely holding it together mentally by their mid-30s while desperately searching for community and purpose? Instead of taking the winding road to their destination, they decided to just beeline their car (brain) straight through muddy fields and, in the process, damage their car.”
Source: The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models
“Throughout history, as humans developed social environments we had not biologically evolved to handle (such as early cities). Through the selective pressures on cultures, we evolved social technologies that permitted relatively rapid adaptation. Unfortunately, from the internet to megacities, the rate of change humans encounter today has become so rapid and momentous that even social evolution may not have time to act before permanent damage is inflicted. We may have reached a point in human history at which we must intentionally engineer cultural solutions to ensure a prosperous future for our species.”
Source: The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models
“One of our goals with this book is to recruit new participants for what we call the Index: A “cultural reactor” that catalogs intentionally constructed family cultures and monitors their outcomes intergenerationally while distributing said information in a way that allows all participating cultures to improve at a faster rate than that of a non-cultivated society. We want to make it possible for cultures in the network to improve faster than normal intergenerational memetic evolutionary powers would allow through a system analogous to horizontal gene transfer in gene therapy or lateral gene transfer in bacteria.”
Source: The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models
“In the field of biology, “superbugs” evolve when a bacterium, fungus, or virus is put in a low-stakes setting where it can both thrive and test itself against a panoply of our best defenses (like antibiotics). Hospitals present one such setting in that they serve as gathering points for already-infected individuals (many of whom are immunocompromised, making them “easy mode” for viruses, fungi, and bacteria) and are packed with antivirals, antifungal, and antibiotic medications. . . . Our modern social landscape has created a similar environment, enabling cultural viruses to evolve. These viruses cannot survive and reproduce independently and must parasitize healthy cultural ecosystems, rewriting healthy cultures' internal machinery to carry out their life cycles.”
Source: The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models
“Wisdom becomes flawed when knowledge is in the wrong hands.”
“Have you ever worked with a leader who didn’t allow mistakes? Perhaps he would say things like, 'Failure is not an option!' There are three problems with this mindset. The first problem with this is that we are human. Meaning, we’re bound to make mistakes. The second problem is it stifles creativity and innovation. People will not risk doing anything original or adaptive if they are afraid of being reprimanded if it doesn’t work. Finally, the third problem with a 'Failure is not an option' mindset is that mistakes can often be great teachers.”
Source: A Leader Worth Imitating: 33 Leadership Principles From the Life of Jesus
“But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”
“The dread did not rise from my thoughts but from my gut, from some corporeal logic that had kept meticulous track of every mistake before this one. That believed there was a finite number of times one could break someone's heart before it hardened to you.”
“Wisdom and worldview are shaped by the instructor which is called experience. The only way to develop as a person is to learn from your mistakes and grow from the experience.”