I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed — for lack of a better word — is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”
Gordon Gekko in ‘Wall Street’ (1987)
“People were human beings to him. But to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they’re cattle. Well in my book, my father died a much richer man than you’ll ever be!”
George Bailey
“The first requisite for a body of practical and progressing thought: recognition of the kind of problem at issue. Lacking this, it has found the shortest distance to a dead end.”
Jane Jacobs
“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion.”
John Stuart Mill
Despite our imperative to deny the ‘triumph of evil’, all too often we allow ourselves to remain politically and socially inert; convincing ourselves that it is permissible – if not outright necessary – to avoid engaging with political activation. This issue of non-participation is too nebulous to address every facet at once, and so here we will consider the narratology of disempowerment, its role and function; what Mills calls the pacifying ‘delusion’. Narratology is the study of narratives. It considers the structure and patterns in stories and, more broadly, ‘how humans use stories as sense-making instruments’. We shall first look at the reasons people may ‘take no part, and form no opinion’, recognising the purpose and importance of these narrative ‘delusions’, before analysing their origins and consequences. In doing so we can begin to see why it is so important to believe in our own political capacity, as well as the very serious ‘harm’ that can come when we defect on our responsibility to ‘take part’.
(more…)“Because more complex and intense intellectual efforts mean a fuller and richer life.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
This quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. can be interpreted in multiple ways. Some may look at this from a functional viewpoint, arguing that ‘intense intellectual efforts’ lead to better decision making, or at least to better understanding, resulting in a measurable increase in personal happiness. However, the ‘fuller and richer life’ he describes could instead be the intrinsic joy of understanding and participating in the flow of ideas. As Aquinas said, ‘it is clear that people who give themselves to the contemplation of truth are the happiest a person in this life can be, happiness consists primarily in intellectual contemplation’. By exploring Wendell’s statement we can start to unpick what he means and discover how we can apply this to our own personal betterment.
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The Archive of Free Thinking