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May 12 - June 14, 2021
A successful society is a progress machine. It takes in the raw material of innovations and produces broad human advancement.
we should also recall Oscar Wilde’s words about such elite helpfulness being “not a solution” but “an aggravation of the difficulty.”
“Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.”
have found myriad ways to “change things on the surface so that in practice nothing changes at all.”
The only thing better than being a fox is being a fox asked to watch over hens.
The best way to bring about meaningful reform was to apprentice in the bowels of the status quo.
“The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion,” Aristotle says, “and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.”
The only truly ultimate good is “human flourishing.”
A generation’s worth of mind-bending innovation had delivered scant progress for half of Americans.
Many of them believed there was more power in building up what was good than in challenging what was bad.
This liberal subcaste would retain the left’s traditional goals of bettering the world and attending to underdogs, but it would increasingly pursue those aims in market-friendly ways.
that if you really want to change the world, you must rely on the techniques, resources, and personnel of capitalism.
Change the world. Improve lives. Invent something new. Solve a complex problem. Extend your talents. Build enduring relationships.
“We would backfill them into the template,”
Management consultants and financiers were critical protagonists in the story of how a small band of elites, including them, had captured most of the spoils of a generation’s worth of innovation.
To take on a problem is to make it your own, and to gain the right to decide what it is not and how it doesn’t need to be solved.
The biggest risk of putting a corporate consulting firm in charge of designing fixes for societal problems is that it may sideline certain fundamental questions about power.
more interested in starting something new than in examining how she and those around her—and the institutions they belonged to—might change their existing ways.
promise of painlessness.
The majority of millennials want to have a job with meaning, but they’re not willing to sacrifice having a good income for it.
The vision reflected a bitter truth: Often, when people set out to do the thing they are already doing and love to do and know how to do, and they promise grand civilizational benefits as a spillover effect, the solution is oriented around the solver’s needs more than the world’s—the win-wins, purporting to be about others, are really about you.
The selfish pursuit of prosperity, Smith is arguing, takes care of everyone just as well as actually attempting to take care of everyone.
winners should receive a kickback from social change.
The study found that going up to poor people in a mall and asking them a hypothetical question about money, such as whether to make an expensive repair to an imaginary car, could drop their IQ on a subsequent test by 13 points relative to people of similar means not reminded of money, a plunge comparable to the effect of being an alcoholic or losing a night’s sleep.)
How did these new barons relieve the cognitive dissonance they might have felt from claiming to improve others’ lives while noticing that their own were perhaps the only ones getting better?
A king presides over a multitude of truths. But a rebel, who takes no responsibility for the whole, is free to pursue his singular truth.
“They fight as though they are insurgents while they operate as though they are kings,”
It can be disturbing that the most influential emerging power center of our age is in the habit of denying its power, and therefore of promoting a vision of change that changes nothing meaningful while enriching itself.
The world may be cruel and unfair, but if you sprinkle seeds of technology on it, shoots of equality will sprout.
Ubers and Airbnbs and Facebooks and Googles of the world are at once radically democratic and dangerously oligarchic.
Gentlemen investors decide what ideas are worth pursuing, and the people pitching to them tailor their proposals accordingly.
when groups operate on vague or anarchic terms, structurelessness “becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others.”
In a world without rules, he wrote, “nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice.” The cardinal virtues in a such a world are “force and fraud.”
platform cooperativism.
“Men in general are seen as possessing more of whatever characteristic is most culturally valued.”
public intellectual, whom Drezner describes as a wide-ranging “critic” and a foe of power; she perhaps stays “aloof from the market, society, or the state,” and she proudly bears a duty “to point out when an emperor has no clothes.”
Thought leaders tend, Drezner says, to “know one big thing and believe that their important idea will change the world”; they are not skeptics but “true believers”;
thought leaders give TED talks that leave little space for criticism or rebuttal, and emphasize hopeful solutions over systemic change.
political polarization: As American politics has grown more tribal, people have become more interested in hearing confirmation of their views, by whoever will offer it, than in being challenged by interesting, intellectually meandering thinkers.
generalized loss of trust in authority.
So America is more interested than ever in the problem of inequality and social fracture—and more dependent than ever on explainers who happen to be in good odor with billionaires.
thought-leader three-step.
“Focus on the victim, not the perpetrator”
“Shifting your attention to the victim makes you more empathetic, increasing the chances that you’ll channel your anger in a constructive direction. Instead of trying to punish the people who caused harm, you’ll be more likely to help the people who were harmed.”
personalize the political.
“There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it. And that was, the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they’re worthy of love and belonging.
The idea that thought leaders are unaffected by their patrons is also contradicted by their very own speakers bureau websites, which illustrate how the peddlers of potentially menacing ideas are rendered less scary to gatherings of the rich and powerful.
Strangely, one of the things that makes it easier to accept the system is that when you do, you will find yourself being told more often that you are changing things.
“rather than just facts and figures, if you can get someone to associate their lives and themselves to whatever it is you’re doing, and assert whatever it is you’re doing into their lives, you’re more likely to create not only a saleable product but love.”
The formal term for the concept is the “assimilation effect,” and it occurs when people link the personal and specific to the surrounding social context.
