The Leaderless Revolution¶
Metadata¶
- Author: Carne Ross
- ASIN: B005X0JSKA
- ISBN: 978-0399158728
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005X0JSKA
- Kindle link
Highlights¶
power is monopolized by the powerful. — location: 78 ^ref-52773
the action of one individual or a small group can affect the whole system very rapidly. — location: 104 ^ref-44560
Show, don’t tell. — location: 112 ^ref-30403
There is an education intrinsic to action—you have to learn about the problem to solve it, for most problems are complex. This education reverses the infantilization and ignorance that authority encourages: You need not worry about the details, because we will take care of it. — location: 117 ^ref-58780
people who participate in decisions tend to stick to them. — location: 134 ^ref-20897
If you do not give people responsibility, they tend to behave irresponsibly, — location: 135 ^ref-54172
We have become too detached from the decisions most important to us; — location: 138 ^ref-35909
Golden Rule: It exhibits a profound solipsism if not arrogance— — location: 158 ^ref-39514
unlike “happiness,” suffering is all too easy to recognize and measure. — location: 161 ^ref-39607
decline from acting to campaigning, — location: 190 ^ref-55064
paralysis of thought is the greatest obstacle to overcome. Defeat it, and everything becomes possible. — location: 198 ^ref-44839
Simply start talking to your neighbors. Identify shared concerns, and take action. — location: 206 ^ref-10675
True power comes not from the assertion of rules and threats, but from the aggregation of honest and sincere voices, and their concerted heartfelt action. — location: 212 ^ref-51749
We have been intimidated by the bullying repetition that the status quo represents the summit of human progress to date, when in its inequality, its carelessness for our planet and its inhumanity to our fellow humans, in many ways it represents the worst. — location: 225 ^ref-26207
These events were not predictable by most conventional theories of politics or economics. — location: 308 ^ref-59630
dispensation— — location: 312 ^ref-23054
the science of complex systems. — location: 313 ^ref-57017
This force of entropy will not be reversed for decades—if not for centuries. — location: 323 ^ref-13799
This new world requires a new politics. — location: 334 ^ref-38056
So often are the virtues of this system avowed that it has taken on the characteristics of a moral system, where anything done in the name of that system, however gross, is morally justified as part of the necessary mechanics of the market. — location: 393 ^ref-32067
the rate at which Americans invite people to their homes has declined by 45 percent. — location: 453 ^ref-54380
The urban majority now barely encounter what their forebears took for granted: trees, fresh air, birdsong, silence. — location: 465 ^ref-54696
peace and escape dreamed of, sometimes purchased, but all too rarely experienced. — location: 466 ^ref-58066
Agency over events—the feeling of control—is a gross absence in the contemporary condition. — location: 476 ^ref-54454
Recapturing it is available through one simple mechanism: action. Action to reassert control over events in our lives. And this in a nutshell is the simple essence of the philosophy to be offered here. We lack control; we need to take it back. — location: 477 ^ref-41410
Evidence and research are now suggesting that the most important agent of change is ourselves. — location: 496 ^ref-47937
the prevailing notion that the individual is impotent in the face of the world’s complex and manifold problems is turned on its head. Instead, the individual is revealed as a powerful motor of change, offering the prospect of immense consequences for politics and the world, and, no less, for themselves. — location: 497 ^ref-49029
In five years working on Iraq, not once had I set foot in the country, yet at the UN. I was called Britain’s Iraq “expert.” — location: 523 ^ref-56269
In claiming to arbitrate the world’s problems, unintentionally it encourages our own inaction and detachment. — location: 534 ^ref-58625
It is the action of individuals which has the most effect on those around them, — location: 540 ^ref-41960
actions in our own microcosmos can have global consequences. — location: 545 ^ref-2999
Changing our own approach is critical: embodying our political beliefs in every action. — location: 551 ^ref-13717
Suicide attacks were not confined to religiously motivated terrorist groups — location: 638 ^ref-48718
The higher the price exacted upon U.S. forces approaching the Japanese homeland, the more, they hoped, America would hesitate to attack the home islands, — location: 647 ^ref-8410
they had a palpable and successful political effect. — location: 650 ^ref-34123
suicide bombing has been perhaps the most influential political-military technique of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: — location: 656 ^ref-49043
most of our lives are “quotations from the lives of others,” — location: 668 ^ref-18852
man should not be named Homo sapiens, “wise man,” but Homo mimicus, “copying man.” — location: 675 ^ref-37916
people take more notice of each other’s actions than they do of formal rules. — location: 689 ^ref-37098
norms are more important than rules: It is the actions of other people that have the most influence on what we do. — location: 700 ^ref-23480
And it is conviction that convinces. — location: 726 ^ref-52860
conviction that propelled the action; it was the action that recruited others to the cause. — location: 728 ^ref-44774
an essential first step to produce any lasting influence and change is the discovery of conviction. — location: 728 ^ref-5653
Claudette Colvin — location: 732 ^ref-29548
“It’s an important reminder that crucial change is often ignited by very plain, unremarkable people who then disappear.” — location: 737 ^ref-59829
Anyone can initiate a profound social change. — location: 743 ^ref-60608
Conviction can be found in myriad different ways, but it can rarely be told: As in all good theater, it is better shown. — location: 748 ^ref-58655
portentousness. — location: 761 ^ref-19280
government is not about mass collective action; only getting someone elected is. — location: 776 ^ref-37932
attention focuses on the intentions and utterances of a very small group of people in the White House and a slightly larger group in Congress, where the betrayals, ethos and peccadilloes of a small number of representatives and senators determine the nature of legislation imposed on a country of three hundred million people. — location: 810 ^ref-34989
For most of us, politics is a spectator sport—we observe, they do. — location: 844 ^ref-6860
deepening chasm between voters and their representatives. — location: 861 ^ref-18174
hundreds of lobbyists to every member of Congress. — location: 880 ^ref-13292
Lawrence Lessig has argued that the mutual dependency of lobbyists and legislators is now so profound, and corrupt, that legislation is enacted with the sole purpose of extracting rents from corporate interests. — location: 907 ^ref-31119
the decisions produced are often grossly divorced from the needs of electors, or even of the state itself. — location: 937 ^ref-28471
Thus, even as consumers exercise their own choice to eat less fat, the government, pressured by cheese lobbyists (hilarious but true), exploits the consequence—unused high-fat milk and cheese—to persuade the consumer to eat more of it. — location: 968 ^ref-4675
interesting twist on the traditional understanding of philanthropy; some foundations now act—with tax-free benefits—as a kind of “force multiplier” for the political preferences of the “philanthropist.” — location: 989 ^ref-32980
either form of influence shares one common characteristic—it is accountable to no one. — location: 991 ^ref-47582
requires participants to be able to articulate one another’s position before having a chance to speak. — location: 1017 ^ref-4806
deepening divide between the public and their nominal representatives. They suggest nothing less than a crisis in democracy. — location: 1031 ^ref-31658
there is only one alternative if government cannot successfully provide: We must do so ourselves. Self-organized government is one term; another, rather more loaded term, is anarchism. — location: 1042 ^ref-34253
guided by their conviction and direct experience—not by party political dogma. — location: 1045 ^ref-29731
Only a fool would wish the abrupt or violent overthrow of the current system, for the certain result would be violent chaos—anarchy of the worst kind. — location: 1049 ^ref-65200
We must learn anew to look to ourselves to produce the effects we desire, to take responsibility for ourselves and for others, and to cooperate and negotiate with each other, instead of leaving that arbitration to an evidently imperfect mechanism. — location: 1051 ^ref-53485
perpetuation of the existing way of doing things, not anarchism, that may pose the greater risk to our peace and security. — location: 1055 ^ref-58132
In southern Kosovo, a large mob was prevented from besieging a Serb Orthodox monastery by the intervention of a local Albanian former KLA guerrilla leader (he was later to become Kosovo’s prime minister). — location: 1104 ^ref-49205
There is scant entertainment involved in the real and actual horrors of humanity—the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge’s “Year Zero” or the butchery of Charles Manson. If anarchy were so close, and so awful, we wouldn’t find its Hollywood depiction entertaining; instead, we would find it horribly frightening, unwatchable. — location: 1121 ^ref-56756
When disaster strikes, like an earthquake in Haiti or a hurricane in New Orleans, it is never long before commentators, safe in their television studios, issue dire warning of social disorder and breakdown, as if this is more frightening than the original natural disaster. — location: 1126 ^ref-18413
Police in one suburb neighboring the flooded city were so alarmed at the prospect of looters and other malcontents that they blocked the bridge from the city, preventing the hungry and desperate from getting help. Others cold-bloodedly shot fleeing refugees. — location: 1130 ^ref-18472
the federal government’s fastest and most efficient response to Hurricane Katrina was the creation of a Kafkaesque, Guantánamo-like prison facility in which twelve hundred American citizens were summarily detained and denied any of their constitutional rights for months.3 — location: 1132 ^ref-19789
Abdulrahman Zeitoun, who after the hurricane paddled around the flooded city in a canoe offering help, ferrying neighbors to higher ground and caring for abandoned pets, only to be arrested by National Guardsmen and held incommunicado for several weeks without charge and without medical attention along with other Arab-American companions. — location: 1135 ^ref-18392
disasters in fact often produce the opposite of disorder in human society: instead of violence and anarchy, community and solidarity. — location: 1138 ^ref-10454
through repeated interaction, convergent interests will prevail over divergent ones.” — location: 1151 ^ref-33926
it’s increasingly evident that these institutions instead elevate the interests of the most powerful interest groups over collective interests, and neglect long-term primary needs, including the environment. — location: 1154 ^ref-52449
It may be that the very rules and institutions established to protect us in fact do the opposite. — location: 1169 ^ref-511
The right to invest in his company was by invitation only, creating an air of desirable—and perhaps disreputable—exclusivity, — location: 1221 ^ref-37499
false allure is the classic sign of a Ponzi scheme. — location: 1224 ^ref-52603
If the teacher is present, what is going on in the playground must be, in some way, acceptable. — location: 1229 ^ref-60171
In 2000, Congress passed a little known law that essentially permitted such betting again. — location: 1249 ^ref-57539
Commodity Futures Modernization Act, — location: 1254 ^ref-43064
one simple and easily explicable measure that would surely have limited the ability of banks to create the chaos that they did: limits on capital-to-loan ratios, — location: 1271 ^ref-5497
Instead of passing the necessary measures in the immediate aftermath of the crash, when they might have been politically possible, the congressional legislation empowers a new regulatory body to pass them in future, when without doubt still less political support will be available. In a sure sign that the legislation was indeed to the benefit, not detriment, of the banks, shares in all financial service companies significantly rose immediately after the Senate vote. — location: 1275 ^ref-37371
There was precious little public debate on the bill, since politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, conspired to pretend that the bill had sharp teeth when in fact it was but a set of crummy plastic dentures. — location: 1290 ^ref-62707
theatrical performance presented for the public’s benefit to reassure them that “something was being done.” — location: 1298 ^ref-27735
philosophy of its founder, Craig Newmark, that “people are good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through the day.” — location: 1319 ^ref-2928
The evidence is mounting that of two otherwise identical businesses, the one that responds quickly and positively, and above all transparently, to customer complaints online, will rapidly gain the better online ratings, with positive consequences for their likely sales. — location: 1332 ^ref-44750
it is possible easily to access the human rights and environmental records of major companies;20 one website allows you to research all the components, and the labor history embodied in them, of even complex products like computers or TVs. — location: 1341 ^ref-61068
The system is revealed as fundamentally iniquitous and persistently vulnerable to crime and violent instability. — location: 1377 ^ref-11313
Everyone has the right to question. This is a right that cannot be taken for granted but must be continually asserted, by one and by all. The more that each of us demands it, the easier it will be for all of us. — location: 1384 ^ref-48488
Only one NGO, a specialist in conflict whose two staff were deeply embedded in Kosovo’s complicated stories, managed to capture the many strands of what had happened there. — location: 1401 ^ref-27710
No one was prepared to take responsibility for the violence, because no one felt responsible for it. — location: 1436 ^ref-23053
behavior of Kosovo’s leaders was immature and childish, because that was what was expected of them. — location: 1436 ^ref-1606
If people do not have responsibility, do not expect them to behave responsibly. — location: 1445 ^ref-35702
The best way, indeed, to invite violent anarchy is to reduce the agency and sense of control that people need to feel over their lives. — location: 1449 ^ref-21531
The Importance of Meeting People — location: 1462 ^ref-56386
leading some to argue that the simplifications of celebrity campaigning have actually helped prolong the conflict. — location: 1500 ^ref-21527
“See, click, fix” allows citizens to identify local problems online for government action. — location: 1525 ^ref-42473
In Nigeria, deadly riots in the city of Jos were fueled, according to one authority, by text messages sent between rampaging mobs; — location: 1540 ^ref-24509
Power adapts to new technology, and swiftly. — location: 1552 ^ref-33154
naive equation that free markets ipso facto produce freedom of speech. — location: 1558 ^ref-58676
the protection of basic freedoms on the Web relies on the goodwill and good intentions of the very small number of people who control its most powerful institutions: — location: 1559 ^ref-20732
algorithms applied by these sites to “personalize” our Web experience are effectively rendering much of the Web invisible. — location: 1569 ^ref-590
vituperation. — location: 1586 ^ref-23133
The more detached people are from one another, the more they can cloak themselves in anonymity and be shielded from the consequences of their views, the more violent, hostile and irresponsible they are likely to be. — location: 1596 ^ref-24119
“deliberative democracy,” but really it can be called something simpler: meeting people. — location: 1603 ^ref-23043
“The Porto Alegre Experiment” — location: 1621 ^ref-63121
not to be confused with America’s overheated “town hall” meetings of recent memory, — location: 1636 ^ref-44021
The more detached groups are from society, the more extreme their decisions are likely to become. — location: 1642 ^ref-61674
When nothing is at stake, and when no one has agency, it is predictable that heated disagreement will be the outcome. — location: 1644 ^ref-11105
future of democratic politics, of both disenchantment and extremism, that may become more and more evident, — location: 1655 ^ref-39376
in more established parliaments and congresses — location: 1656 ^ref-39378
when a group of people gathers together to consider their affairs and collective response to them—and, crucially, make decisions—a number of valuable benefits follow: — location: 1670 ^ref-18016
the essence of democracy: discussion — location: 1694 ^ref-60350
The mere ventilation of opinions, whether in person or online, does not qualify. — location: 1696 ^ref-32448
trouble with deliberative democracy is, of course, that it poses a direct challenge to the existing constitutional order of representative democracy, — location: 1703 ^ref-8509
in the existing system, it is not tolerable to the existing authority for citizens to gather to sort out their affairs and make decisions with real effects: that is what governments are for! — location: 1705 ^ref-54660
Homage to Catalonia — location: 1722 ^ref-2375
it is a problem of any system that suppresses people’s sense of agency. — location: 1760 ^ref-17922
It was the participants’ assumption for relinquishing of agency that determined their actions. — location: 1799 ^ref-10384
when people feel no agency and no responsibility for their actions, they can commit horrific crimes. — location: 1802 ^ref-37688
the naive view that since I had nothing in my life to be ashamed of, I would tell them the truth. — location: 1827 ^ref-56181
that today’s moral choices rarely come so clearly signaled. — location: 1873 ^ref-62150
In summary, sanctions were in place because Iraq had not correctly answered questions. — location: 1895 ^ref-42334
Governments and their officials can compose convincing versions of the truth, filled with more or less verifiable facts, and yet be entirely wrong. — location: 1912 ^ref-11989
validated by constant repetition: true, but not the whole truth. — location: 1920 ^ref-14836
One assumption of those planning that war was that Iraq’s middle class would quickly recover from Saddam’s removal, and Iraq’s economy would rapidly thrive. That assumption quickly met the brute force of the reality that there was no longer an Iraqi middle class and no economy to speak of. — location: 1926 ^ref-15000
Within a year of the imposition of sanctions, Iraq’s GDP had dropped by about three-quarters of its 1990 value to approximately that of the 1940s. — location: 1929 ^ref-58094
1990 to 2003, there was an “excess mortality rate” of more than 500,000 for children under five. — location: 1935 ^ref-60447
it was often deemed “emotional” or “immature” to burden arguments with moral sentiment. — location: 1942 ^ref-25451
Though the arguments we played out in stuffy rooms in the UN in New York often seemed abstract, the effects of sanctions on ordinary men, women and children were to them all too painful. — location: 1956 ^ref-40540
problem intrinsic to any system where people feel dissociated from the consequences of their actions—where they feel that someone else, not them, is really in control. — location: 1960 ^ref-29976
The more government seeks to act to tackle particular problems, the less individuals are likely to feel responsible for them. — location: 1962 ^ref-10681
Confront individuals with the consequences of their actions. Restore the moral understanding that each of us is responsible for the world as it is, and for each other. Take away the man in the white coat. — location: 1965 ^ref-59333
All depictions must therefore reduce and thereby distort. — location: 1983 ^ref-41410
That invasion indirectly led to the de facto separation of Iraq’s Kurdish north, the rise of Iran as the dominant regional power and, likely and tragically, the demise of the Christian community in Iraq, — location: 2012 ^ref-41821
the insatiable global appetite for fish has driven international fishing fleets—from Japan, Russia and Europe—to plunder Somalia’s unprotected waters, denying a livelihood to Somalia’s many coastal fishermen. — location: 2023 ^ref-17255
What we witness in the world is not ordered, at least in a sequential, logical fashion, but neither is it chaos. — location: 2038 ^ref-28782
It is depressing to relate the utter failure of those making these commitments to keep to them. — location: 2064 ^ref-37708
There will be more such declarations, freshened up with new slogans and impassioned speeches or tweets, or Facebook pages, or whatever, in future. — location: 2072 ^ref-4319
the financial industry’s lobbyists in each country have conspired to ensure that every government is unwilling to trade their supposed competitive advantage for collective measures, like globally agreed and sufficient capital requirements for lenders. — location: 2077 ^ref-49510
In its own way, this is a comforting and self-serving excuse that requires little response save cynicism on our part. — location: 2083 ^ref-36233
Diplomacy and international relations are, by their nature, about nation states. — location: 2092 ^ref-53016
states, and their exponents, do not accurately reflect what humans are about, nor what they want. — location: 2094 ^ref-21180
One consequence of this extraordinarily dissociated chain between diplomat and citizen is that the diplomat can have no accurate idea of what the citizen wants. — location: 2107 ^ref-43985
Diplomats, by the nature of their job, are encouraged to believe that they can determine what is in their nation’s interests, without consulting those in whose name they claim to be operating. — location: 2110 ^ref-8853
The identification between diplomat and state cannot be overemphasized. — location: 2123 ^ref-60444
a fundamentally incredible one—that the needs and wants of the Earth’s billions of people can be boiled down into separate and discrete subsets of interests which can then be meaningfully arbitrated. — location: 2126 ^ref-41572
to turn their understanding of the world, and our needs upon it, into something else: the calculus of states. — location: 2135 ^ref-5906
the segregation of ourselves into two competing sides—was not to reduce conflict, but to perpetuate it. — location: 2144 ^ref-53363
the habit of referring to whole countries in the singular and referring to their government as the embodiment of that state is one as deep-rooted as the state-based international system itself. — location: 2150 ^ref-8157
where a shared solution is clearly necessary and urgent, the habit of state-led thinking still dominates. — location: 2166 ^ref-20503
“It is now evident that beating global warming will require a radically different model of politics than the one on display here in Copenhagen.” — location: 2174 ^ref-44179
the “process” is a way of shelving the issue indefinitely, to permit the existing status quo—of occupation. The process is thus a sham, the opposite of what it pretends to be. — location: 2186 ^ref-1619
The UN’s sixty-year existence has witnessed a steep decline in the interstate conflict prohibited by its charter. But in these successes, new weaknesses have emerged, not least in dealing with the more fluid and boundary-less problems of the twenty-first century. — location: 2189 ^ref-19111
The UN Security Council was established to prevent wars between states. Today, not less than 80 percent of its agenda concerns issues involving nonstate actors, — location: 2191 ^ref-54972
The greater the distance between representative and elector, the less legitimate that representative. — location: 2194 ^ref-53106
the limits of nation-state thinking are inherent to the nation-state system, a system that has, since the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, dominated world affairs. — location: 2213 ^ref-29351
diplomacy now takes place among anyone who is someone; its prerequisite is not sovereignty but authority.” — location: 2217 ^ref-52722
The international is not international any more; it is simply us. — location: 2223 ^ref-46425
The most dangerous effect of the system is not that it doesn’t work; it is that we, in whose name it is supposed to function, condone it, pretend to believe it contrary to all evidence and permit it to continue.* — location: 2228 ^ref-35235
How can the world be made to reflect its human reality rather than its inherited and inappropriate delineations of segregated states and peoples? — location: 2232 ^ref-10051
the argument that nuclear weapons have successfully prevented mass conventional war between their possessors. It’s a plausible argument, as long as the proxy conventional wars that these powers fought on the territories of others are ignored. — location: 2264 ^ref-2146
A Pakistani attack on New Delhi would kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims. An attack on Israel would kill thousands of Arabs. Any use of nuclear weapons, more or less anywhere, would have devastating effects on a highly interlinked global economy. — location: 2294 ^ref-19210
Killing Them would mean killing Us. — location: 2297 ^ref-33297
nuclear weapons are revealed in their true nature: not as weapons of deterrence or plausible utility, but as mankind’s suicide pill. — location: 2301 ^ref-37315
Wherever possible, travel, interact, make love, argue, live with people elsewhere. Engage; co-mingle. Resist the efforts of governments and others to paint the Other in stark colors, whether black or white. Throw away the chessboard; cut the ground from under those who would pretend humanity is but chessmen. Cease using the outdated nomenclature of a world that is already receding into history; stop naming; stop dividing. — location: 2308 ^ref-39423
China owns nearly a trillion dollars’ worth of securitized American government debt—a cyber attack on Wall Street would harm China as much as it harmed the U.S. — location: 2318 ^ref-16747
Complex systems are not chaotic. They are not simple and ordered, but neither are they an uncontrolled mess. Complex systems are instead something “in between,” — location: 2330 ^ref-35795
to act themselves to produce desired political results, cooperating and negotiating directly with others affected—then a new dispensation will emerge, something that we may not yet be able to describe. — location: 2336 ^ref-26865
in truth our control over events never left us, only our belief in its existence. — location: 2346 ^ref-3087
The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently. — location: 2352 ^ref-15040
“common security clubs” — location: 2359 ^ref-55907
this new form of politics will become less about protest or petition and more about action. — location: 2362 ^ref-33779
The world should be ordered according to our needs, not the projections and requirements of static institutions. — location: 2372 ^ref-13901
Gandhi’s “salt march” or “Salt Satyagraha” is rightly renowned as one of the most important acts of political protest in recent history. — location: 2381 ^ref-28959
the Force which is born of Truth and Love or nonviolence, — location: 2391 ^ref-9958
combined with an acute political intelligence, — location: 2396 ^ref-34159
sixty thousand people were arrested for making salt. — location: 2406 ^ref-56780
this sacrifice failed to win any immediate concessions from the British, and it would be another seventeen years before India would at last be independent. — location: 2416 ^ref-55159
“England can hold India only by consent; we can’t rule it by the sword.” And thanks to the salt march, they had lost that consent. — location: 2421 ^ref-30097
the action itself contributed to the political result intended. — location: 2428 ^ref-62973
In a war, the decisive thing is not the military confrontation but the politics at stake in the confrontation. — location: 2444 ^ref-57540
The most basic declaration of discontent, repeated, sends a signal that the status quo cannot endure. — location: 2468 ^ref-65374
laws follow action, not vice versa. — location: 2475 ^ref-1511
it is changing attitudes and demonstrating new forms of behavior, as much as laws, that matters. — location: 2485 ^ref-38493
“The battle is not just won by force and sequestrations, but by a social struggle. It is a cultural battle.” — location: 2490 ^ref-21163
This book argues that people will benefit by taking charge of their shared affairs locally, but crucially this means that they must also have agency over these decisions: control. — location: 2496 ^ref-57974
Spedan Lewis — location: 2533 ^ref-60611
everyone in society is better off—in terms of mental health, crime and other indicators—in economies with greater wealth equality. — location: 2544 ^ref-63024
“limited purpose banking” — location: 2571 ^ref-37658
They would neither borrow nor trade with borrowed funds. — location: 2575 ^ref-58961
Evident in these debates is an assumption that there are only two options—public or private—to resolve the “tragedy of the commons,” whereby common resources such as water, land or oceans will be abused by some, and neglected by all, without some form of order. — location: 2582 ^ref-65226
the most important criterion for the success of such schemes was this: active participation in setting and enforcing the collective rules to manage the common good. — location: 2591 ^ref-52085
there must be some system of rationing care. — location: 2603 ^ref-43354
embrace and exploit that reality. — location: 2631 ^ref-26476
how the individual might engage upon the issues that most concern them. — location: 2643 ^ref-20873
Locate your convictions. — location: 2650 ^ref-15469
What makes you angry? What never fails to irritate you for its stupidity and injustice? — location: 2655 ^ref-3759
anger puts fuel in the tank. — location: 2656 ^ref-7715
Life is about means, not ends. — location: 2690 ^ref-35242
Nirvana tomorrow does not justify avoidable suffering now. — location: 2693 ^ref-19818
This rule is in fact dramatically wrong, for it assumes that we know what they want or need. — location: 2699 ^ref-65430
Ask people what they want. — location: 2706 ^ref-46755
How should one respond to suffering? — location: 2734 ^ref-43954
if everyone in the rich world gave a mere 1 percent of their income, poverty and preventable disease in the world could be effectively eradicated. — location: 2742 ^ref-49768
How is compassion between people generated? One clear and straightforward answer presents itself: the encounter. — location: 2761 ^ref-52107
It is clearly not enough to know that people “out there” are suffering. But locate oneself next to that suffering, as my wife and I found in the Malian desert, and the reaction becomes entirely different, even though the facts and our knowledge of them remain exactly the same. — location: 2765 ^ref-50821
States, borders and indeed institutions in general must by their very nature limit our engagement with one another; — location: 2772 ^ref-16985
by limiting that engagement, somewhere along the way our compassion is eviscerated. — location: 2773 ^ref-5708
In Switzerland, a popular referendum affirmed a ban on mosque construction, though there are very few mosques already. — location: 2783 ^ref-28985
these reductions in social solidarity and “social capital” were short-term effects. — location: 2789 ^ref-10672
Here, you can make the most difference. — location: 2801 ^ref-1032
They were polite and patient. — location: 2816 ^ref-1242
Negotiation should ideally be direct, — location: 2822 ^ref-28688
Keep in mind the overall change you wish to achieve, but act a little every day to make it reality. — location: 2832 ^ref-51616
distilled the epic struggle against British colonial rule into a simple but practical act that anyone could undertake: making salt. — location: 2840 ^ref-21766
find a goal that is great: — location: 2843 ^ref-11048
Do not be satisfied with process, but only with results. — location: 2943 ^ref-18379
The measure is effects in the real world on the thing you are trying to change: — location: 2947 ^ref-45500
“The Hedgehog and the Fox,” — location: 2979 ^ref-38130
The greatest strength of the right has been its appeal to individual enterprise and self-expression, freed of the deadening burden of government. That of the left is its recognition that we are not separated from one another, that community embraces and succors all, opposing injustice, inequality and a merely selfish and ultimately divisive individualism. We are all better off together. — location: 3010 ^ref-54161
there is more available than the ugliness, conflict and emptiness of contemporary society. — location: 3026 ^ref-17902
the cynic, as Oscar Wilde once observed, knows only the price of everything, not its value. — location: 3074 ^ref-36394
show, don’t tell—and neither forcing others nor lecturing them, and least of all ramming change down unyielding throats. — location: 3089 ^ref-55286
the failure of the state-based system in managing our most worrying problems—economic volatility, climate change—indicates that the system itself may now be the problem, for it is more perpetuating this instability than solving it. — location: 3097 ^ref-52790
Social ‘silences’ serve to maintain power structures, in ways that participants often barely understand themselves let alone plan.” — location: 3111 ^ref-60879
ordained by unarguable theory if not by some supreme power. This is exactly how the silence is perpetuated; this is exactly how the status quo is maintained. — location: 3118 ^ref-54875
inaction in the face of inequity and looming crisis is to render ourselves less than we are. — location: 3122 ^ref-32234
As the disorder grows, so too, with inevitability, will emerge those who promise to tame it with authoritarianism and, inevitable but admitted only sotto voce, coercive force. — location: 3138 ^ref-19987
we have forgotten that we are at our best in adventure, compassion for others and the aspiration for something greater. — location: 3150 ^ref-7750
When confronted by danger and unfathomable challenge, as we surely are, only then are we truly alive. — location: 3150 ^ref-64009
“Future Shock: — location: 3193 ^ref-23570
(New York: Simon & Schuster, — location: 3250 ^ref-48355
See Niall Ferguson, — location: 3407 ^ref-24617
Judith Brown, the eminent historian of Gandhi, reaches a more nuanced view of the Salt Satyagraha, and indeed Gandhi’s movement of civil resistance, — location: 3418 ^ref-10766
Elinor Ostrom’s excellent “meta-research” article — location: 3441 ^ref-15608
The Heritage Foundation published an interesting but not comprehensive analysis of principles to observe in health care cooperatives: — location: 3444 ^ref-13795
“Healthcare Cooperatives, Doing It the Right Way” — location: 3445 ^ref-24257