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June 15 - December 16, 2019
It’s neither possible nor desirable for individuals or nations to change completely, and to discard everything of their former identities. The challenge, for nations as for individuals in crisis, is to figure out which parts of their identities are already functioning well and don’t need changing, and which parts are no longer working and do need changing.
Table 1.1. Factors related to the outcomes of personal crises 1. Acknowledgment that one is in crisis 2. Acceptance of one’s personal responsibility to do something 3. Building a fence, to delineate one’s individual problems needing to be solved 4. Getting material and emotional help from other individuals and groups 5. Using other individuals as models of how to solve problems 6. Ego strength 7. Honest self-appraisal 8. Experience of previous personal crises 9. Patience 10. Flexible personality 11. Individual core values 12. Freedom from personal constraints
Table 1.2. Factors related to the outcomes of national crises 1. National consensus that one’s nation is in crisis 2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do something 3. Building a fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be solved 4. Getting material and financial help from other nations 5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the problems 6. National identity 7. Honest national self-appraisal 8. Historical experience of previous national crises 9. Dealing with national failure 10. Situation-specific national flexibility 11. National core values 12. Freedom from
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a small country purely and simply cannot afford to mix emotions—be they feelings of sympathy or antipathy—into its foreign policy solutions. A realistic foreign policy should be based on awareness of the essential factors in international politics, namely national interests and the power of relationships between states.”
If democracy does end in the U.S., it won’t be through an uprising led by the heads of the armed forces; there are other ways to end democracy.
the seas protecting the U.S. and Britain meant that inept leaders doing stupid things didn’t bring disaster upon their countries,
“One should always try to see where God is striding through world history, and in what direction He is heading. Then, jump in and hold on to His coattails, to get swept along as far as one can go.”
Why should any country celebrate the slaughter of its young men, betrayed by British leadership, half-way around the world, on a peninsula that rivals the Sudan in its irrelevance to Australia’s national interests?
Sooner or later, Australia will elect an Asian as its prime minister.
Japanese government school policies: schools in socio-economically disadvantaged areas have smaller classes (more favorable teacher-to-student ratios) than do schools in richer areas, thereby making it easier for children of poorer citizens to catch up.
Knowledge that peaceful outlets for expression exist reduces the risk of civil violence.
“What counts in democracy is the semblance of democracy.”
A further basic advantage of democracy is that compromise is essential to its operation.
Corruption is bad for a country or for a business, because decisions become influenced by what’s good for corrupt politicians or business people, even though the decision may be bad for the country or the business as a whole.
The first, and also in my opinion the most ominous, of the fundamental problems now threatening American democracy is our accelerating deterioration of political compromise.
The U.S. is very unlikely to suffer a take-over by our military acting independently. I instead foresee one political party in power in the U.S. government or in state governments increasingly manipulating voter registration, stacking the courts with sympathetic judges, using those courts to challenge election outcomes, and then invoking “law enforcement” and using the police, the National Guard, the army reserve, or the army itself to suppress political opposition.
There is no way that China or Mexico can destroy the U.S. Only we Americans can destroy ourselves.
If a country has a constitution or laws specifying democratic government but the country’s citizens don’t or can’t vote, such a country doesn’t deserve to be called a democracy.
No country approaches the U.S. in the expense and uninterrupted operation of our political campaigning. In contrast, in the United Kingdom election campaigning is restricted by law to a few weeks before an election, and the amount of money that can be spent for campaign purposes is also restricted by law.
state funding of higher education has grown at only 1/25th of the rate of state funding for prisons, to the point where a dozen U.S. states now spend more on their prison systems than they do on their systems of higher education.
American teachers have the lowest relative salaries (i.e., relative to average national salaries for all jobs) among major democracies.
In contrast to most other major democracies, where the national government funds education and sets standards, in the U.S. that responsibility falls on the individual states and local government.
There isn’t widespread agreement that our fundamental problems are our polarization, voter turnout and obstacles to voter registration, inequality and declining socio-economic mobility, and declining government investment in education and public goods.
Factors that stand in the way of a good outcome are our current lack of consensus about whether we are indeed entering a crisis, our frequent blaming of our problems on others rather than recognizing our own responsibilities, the efforts of too many powerful Americans to protect themselves rather than working to fix their country, and our unwillingness to learn from the models of other countries.
Today, the U.S. and Russia pose a big threat to each other, from a possible misinterpretation leading to an attack not planned in advance—because they are not in constant frank communication, and they are failing to convince each other that they pose no threat from a possible attack planned in advance.
since 1945 there have been two known events in which accidents at nuclear power stations did kill people: the 32 people killed immediately, and the large but uncertain number who died subsequently from radiation, as a result of the Chernobyl reactor accident in the former Soviet Union; and the Fukushima reactor accident in Japan.
we should weigh our fear of the possibility of a nuclear reactor accident against the certainty of the millions of deaths caused every year by air pollution resulting from burning fossil fuels, and the enormous and possibly ruinous consequences of global climate change caused by fossil fuels.
“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
strong leaders with unlimited power can have more effect (whether for good or for bad) than leaders with only limited power.
leaders make the most difference under circumstances where they face strong opposition (whether in democracies or autocracies) from people espousing a very different policy, and where the leaders nevertheless eventually get their views to prevail, usually by cautious step-by-step efforts.
