“At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man's power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second.”
Source: War and Peace
“War brings out the ugliest side of humanity regardless of ethnicity, creed or location.”
Source: Tajrish
“Money is corrosive. It ruins the fabric of society. It makes people think irrationally. It creates injustice and makes human nature stick out its ugliest face. The line in the Bible where it says money is evil must be true.”
Source: Tajrish
“All human beings do wrong, but that's just what compels us to do good.”
“Look back and thank God for letting you climb perilous mountains, of which you came out as if nothing happened, as He preserved you from threats.”
Source: Coming to Grips with the Mountains and Valleys of This World
“She was a complete human being, with enlightened brilliance, cruelty, instincts, and subconscious trauma all sharing the one-room apartment of the mind.”
Source: Dark Cascade
“A culture can be thought of as ever-evolving software that sits on top of—and synergistically interacts with—both biological hardware and firmware, addressing flaws our biology hasn’t had sufficient evolutionary time to address. To go further with this analogy: Biological evolution provides some basic coding, much like a low-level programming language might for a given hardware, whereas cultural evolution manipulates the high-level, object-oriented code that lets us program highly nuanced behaviors.”
Source: The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models
“When a person gets severe radiation poisoning, some time passes before they feel the adverse effects. Their DNA has functionally been scrambled; their cells can’t divide; the person is dead—they just don’t know it yet. Many wildly popular cultural movements are currently in this state. It may be easier to coax a caged panda to reproduce than it would be to convince a cosmopolitan progressive to raise their own kid.”
Source: The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models
“Our goal with this book is to, for the first time, intentionally design an opt-in, diverse, multiphase ecosystem that can govern the interaction of multiple specialized cultures, which will serve society through their diversity of viewpoints, skill sets, and talents. Until now, competing cultures have been dumped into a geographic cage and forced to “figure it out for themselves” with only the barest of rules (like “don’t kill each other”) governing their interactions.”
Source: The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models
“Once the supervirus controls a certain number of nodes within a culture, it begins to systematically erase that culture's core, including its inherent values and objectives, maintaining only cosmetic features (consider attributes like accents, dress, superficial holidays … nothing representing deep underlying beliefs). . . . The supervirus has already gutted a few of the more progressively minded cultivars to a point at which they are now functionally the same culture wearing different skins … and it won’t stop there, having wrapped its tendrils deep within many more traditional belief systems. In erasing the genuine differences in how these cultures historically saw the world—the “offensive” bits—the supervirus robs us of these cultivars’ rich cultural histories and unique approaches to problems. It achieves equality by shaving off beliefs, objectives, and traditions that may produce genuine conflict among its vassals. The last thing our society needs is a monoculture wearing a skin mask of its victims.”
Source: The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models