SYSTEMS OF SURVIVAL
Characters
Armbruster Jasper Kate Ben Quincy Hortense: |
Lives in an apartment, fine old building off Manhattan’s Gramercy Square. Was Armbruster’s most successful author. He writes crime novels. 30. Youngest guest. Memory book: Instinct or Recollection? Wrote book Numbered Days for the Planet, best seller. Never turns down an invitation. Works in a major New York bank. Friends with Armbruster. Armbruster’s niece. 43. Lawyer. |
Chapter 1 Armbruster's Summons
Armbruster have invited this guests to talk about the dishonesty in workplaces.
Starts saying how amazed he was in a commonplace, but seemed extraordinary in a bank in Zurich, were he handed his money to a strange person, in a strange place and got back a paper that he didn’t understand the language. He realizied that it ws a great web of trust in the honesty of business. And how much we take for granted in business transactions suspends from that gossamer web.
Problem in the biology department about a pirated software. Knowingly buying and using stolen material was normal. A loss of rudimentary bearings.
Kate says people didn’t make that on the purpose of greed, but because they needed tools but had limited budget, that’s why it was tolerated.
I daresay we all have vested interests in other people’s honesty?
we do depend upon moral norms everyday working behavior.
If the norms go, for whatever reasons, what have we to rely on?
Conventional idea that unemployment and poverty are major causes of crime. Crime can be a cause of unemployment and poverty
Accounting regularities?
If your point is that society forces us into dishonest behavior, by all means fo go into it?
How can people stay honest, even if they want to, when the whole system’s rotten?
Government run business are such swamps of waste and futility
Why don’t lawyers, of all people, keep their ethics straight?
Is that progress or destruction?
Why can’t we believe everything our political leaders tell us?
Morality and practical manners
Even chaos has patterns
We must try to think in a systematic fashion about morality in a practical working life.
Tradition older than the novel- dialogue, didactic talking heads, if you will goes back to plato and possibly to the dawn of consciousness about right and wrong, whenever that was. The form- disagreements, speculations, second thoughts, questions, answers, amended answers, it’s suited to the problematic subject matter.
Perhaps it will clarify our own understanding of how the world works, and that’s worth something
1. identify our system, or systems of moral behavior concerned with work.
The problem isn’t recognizing what’s wrong; it’s doing what’s right, or enforcing it.
Why even our own subcultures differ in standards of acceptable behavior?
Moral relativist moral objectivist
Starts saying how amazed he was in a commonplace, but seemed extraordinary in a bank in Zurich, were he handed his money to a strange person, in a strange place and got back a paper that he didn’t understand the language. He realizied that it ws a great web of trust in the honesty of business. And how much we take for granted in business transactions suspends from that gossamer web.
Problem in the biology department about a pirated software. Knowingly buying and using stolen material was normal. A loss of rudimentary bearings.
Kate says people didn’t make that on the purpose of greed, but because they needed tools but had limited budget, that’s why it was tolerated.
I daresay we all have vested interests in other people’s honesty?
we do depend upon moral norms everyday working behavior.
If the norms go, for whatever reasons, what have we to rely on?
Conventional idea that unemployment and poverty are major causes of crime. Crime can be a cause of unemployment and poverty
Accounting regularities?
If your point is that society forces us into dishonest behavior, by all means fo go into it?
How can people stay honest, even if they want to, when the whole system’s rotten?
Government run business are such swamps of waste and futility
Why don’t lawyers, of all people, keep their ethics straight?
Is that progress or destruction?
Why can’t we believe everything our political leaders tell us?
Morality and practical manners
Even chaos has patterns
We must try to think in a systematic fashion about morality in a practical working life.
Tradition older than the novel- dialogue, didactic talking heads, if you will goes back to plato and possibly to the dawn of consciousness about right and wrong, whenever that was. The form- disagreements, speculations, second thoughts, questions, answers, amended answers, it’s suited to the problematic subject matter.
Perhaps it will clarify our own understanding of how the world works, and that’s worth something
1. identify our system, or systems of moral behavior concerned with work.
The problem isn’t recognizing what’s wrong; it’s doing what’s right, or enforcing it.
Why even our own subcultures differ in standards of acceptable behavior?
Moral relativist moral objectivist
MORAL SYSTEMS
The Commercial Moral SyndromeShun force
Come to voluntary agreements Be honest Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens Compete Respect contracts Use initiative and enterprise Be open to inventiveness and novelty Be efficient Promote comfort and convenience Dissent for the sake of the task Invest for productive purposes Be industrious Be thrifty Be optimistic |
The Guardian Moral SyndromeShun trading
Exert prowess Be obedient and disciplined Adhere to tradition Respect hierarchy Be loyal Take vengeance Deceive for the sake of the task Make rich use of leisure Be ostentatious Dispense largesse Be exclusive Show fortitude Be fatalistic Treasure honor |
Chapter 2 A pair of Contradictions
Courage master of all virtues because it makes practice of all the others possible
I don’t believe the successful of a species is meaningless
Moral system A- Classical bourgeois values and virtues. Dealt with commerce, production of goods, or services of commerce, most scientific work.
Moral system B: enigmatic. What conditions does it characterize if the list is a syndrome too? They are all concerned with some aspect of territorial responsibilities. Work of protecting acquiring exploiting administering or controlling territories.
Justice or right is simply to speak the truth and to pay back any debt one may have contracted.
Syndrome a commercial
Syndrome b guardians
Justice according to Socrates is to perform one’s own task and not to meddle with that of others.
What’s the deal for the cobbler to switch to carpentry?
I don’t believe the successful of a species is meaningless
Moral system A- Classical bourgeois values and virtues. Dealt with commerce, production of goods, or services of commerce, most scientific work.
Moral system B: enigmatic. What conditions does it characterize if the list is a syndrome too? They are all concerned with some aspect of territorial responsibilities. Work of protecting acquiring exploiting administering or controlling territories.
Justice or right is simply to speak the truth and to pay back any debt one may have contracted.
Syndrome a commercial
Syndrome b guardians
Justice according to Socrates is to perform one’s own task and not to meddle with that of others.
What’s the deal for the cobbler to switch to carpentry?
Chapter 3 Kate on the Commercial Syndrome
Shun force commercial wealth is found in the midst of things. It has a second meaning it also forbids commercial people themselves to use force.
Come to voluntary agreements “I’ll trade you”, when violence or intimidation enters a transaction, it’s no longer trade it taking by force.
Be honest gives substance to voluntary agreements.
Notice that we have basic reasons that commercial people need symbiotic hemp from guardians to prosecute and punish, suppressing it down to supportable levels even if the ideal of eliminating it completely isn’t realistic.
Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens links with honesty: if we trust each other this way, why can’t leaders trust each other too? Were are being ruined by these foolish wars.
Trust is feasible only where honesty is usual.
Compete: voluntary agreement, presupposes choice.
Respect contracts gives substance to voluntary agreement.
Actions is conflict with recognized public policy are not protected by contacts or the courts
So many of what we call civil rights are actually rights to make contracts as equals
Contractual law allows ordinary people to use initiative and enterprise makes it feasible as a practical matter.
Dissent only for the sake of task: consider that every single improvement in efficiency of production or distribution requires dissent from the way things were previously done.
People who take practical steps to forestall surprise and misfortunes are, by definition optimists.
What does grab commercial people emotionally as well as practically is ingenious ways to forestall disaster.
Art- can flourish magnificently in cultures and subcultures with little commerce to speak of. Science, develops only freely in a culture until trade and production have already been developing vigorously.
Trade, production and the technologies they use stimulate all manner of scientific curiosity, simultaneously, inventive commercial life provides diversifying tools for pursuing the curiosity.
It’s understood that theories can’t be proved, they can only be disproved.
Keep up a high esteem of time an be every day more careful that you lose none of your time than you are that you lose none of your gold and silver.
Why two syndromes and not three?
Chapter 4 Why two syndromes?
I think we have two distinct syndromes because we have two distinct ways of making a living, no more no less.
First, we are able to take what we want- but we are also capable of trading, exchanging our goods and services for other goods, depending on what’s available. But in this case, what’s available for exchange rather than taking. Available for exchange by voluntary agreement, the essence of trading.
Taking-trading
One of our many built-in limitations
Two moral syndromes as systems of survival
You’ve been systematizing a stratum of behavior that underlies what we conventionally accept as morality. Some of your precepts obviously correspond with legal or ethical views of right and wrong. Other’s don’t. you’ve put them both more or less on par.
You’ve ignored a third method, it’s based on the common good. From each according to his abiities, and to each according to his needs!
An elegant principle-but such a flop in practice.
Kate got Jasper to be hooked by the detective work of carefully studying the guardian syndromes, there are up for next month’s meeting.
Chapter 5 Jasper and Kate on the guardian syndrome
What’s the distinction between largesse and trade?
In 19 century, a polish aristocrat who dared meddle in trade was supposed to lose his rank and the landholdings and privileges that went with it.
For being cultural, for being commercial.
Nonprofit activities are morally superior to profit-making commercial enterprises.
Why was plain straightforward, direct trading dishonorable?
Maddening
For most people, finding an answer, right or wrong, precedes recognizing that a valid question even exists.
That so many parents think children’s questions are not only tiresome but foolish when they don’t have answers.
The trading taboo was a form of security against sieges or sanctions, the idea being that it made military sense for old-time aristocrats to have self-sufficient manors or fiefdoms instead of growing dependent on outside suppliers or customers. And of course economic self-sufficiency for military reasons has often been a policy of statesmen; there is that much to be said for the idea. But otherwise it is no good because it ignores too many clues.
Personal self-respect and honor.
Trading was prudent and sensible.
Warriors posses valuable military knowledge.
But the higher a person’s military rank, the more valuable can be his potentially damaging stock in trade, as rule.
Trading secrets to the enemy is fundamentally like any trading. Both parties strike a bargain voluntarily for mutual benefit.
The precept to shun trading would still stand firm as a guardian virtue.
Bribe taking and breach of trust.
Voluntary agreement for mutual benefit. Corrupt trading
That’s one reason guardian themselves need guardians, because guardian supervisors or detectives can also be corrupt themselves, or stupid.
Exert prowess: having power and using it effectively.
Four major codes in chivalry: honor, loyalty, largesse, courtesy.
Regimes rely heavily on persuasion and custom to get their way.
Enforcement, backed up by the sheer physical power to prevail, is praiseworthy in guardian work.
Prowess links directly with obedience and discipline.
Any country is stultified and backward if it lacks inventive, enterprising commercial life.
Respect hierarchy: the chief principle of organization for guardians.
Guardians morals and values comes largely from origins in military.
Political parties are guardian entities, organized religions, they lay stress on unconditional loyalty to the faith.
Loyalty embodies a mystique transcending obedience of unbreakable fraternity, unconditional comradeship.
Children everywhere are indoctrinated with the righteousness and worthiness of their nation or empire, at considerable expense of truth.
If loyalty must be so drummed in, how did this virtue arise within cultures in the first place?
To escape mayhem from each other, armed men need bonds so strong, so highly values, so mystical that they aren’t broken under pressure of greed, or any other temptation to do in a brother-in arms.
It seems a good guess that the same organizations that gave us hierarchies, obedience, discipline, and central authority also gave us unbreakable loyalty as an ideal moral quality.
Loyalty converts from virtue to vice when the guardian precepts in the syndrome break down.
Take vengeance: the drive to retaliate packs enormous emotional power.
How and why guardians monopolize vengeance?
It’s the social contract, citizens surrender their use of force, including vengeance, for the benefits of civil peace.
He (Clark) calls the idea of a social contract intellectually attractive because it seems to reconcile the need for obedience to government with the desirable condition that government should rest on consent of the governed. But he points out that any such contract, if it existed, could not be between equals, and dismisses what he calls the halfhearted efforts of some old writers to find an ancient historical origin for a social contract. –symbolic function- the natural rights are symbolic fiction.
No answers are better than false answer**
Remember that monopolizing vengeance also means taking responsibility for doing justice. – a man armed troops forbidden to wreak private vengeance, some substitute is necessary to deal with soldier who do, in fact, inflict injuries on brother soldiers.
Successful hunting bands have a conservation ethic. They confine their activities to their needs.
Surprising potentialities.
Largesse is the guardian form of investment: specifically, investment in power, influence, and control.
It creates dependency.
Be fatalistic often encourages superstition
Honor is recognition of status and the respect owed to status.
The respect is owed, the self-respect is earned.
Honor implies moral obligations, possessions certifies that the obligations attached to a position- are admirably fulfilled.
They act on the premise that what’s right for a guardian is right for everybody.
In 19 century, a polish aristocrat who dared meddle in trade was supposed to lose his rank and the landholdings and privileges that went with it.
For being cultural, for being commercial.
Nonprofit activities are morally superior to profit-making commercial enterprises.
Why was plain straightforward, direct trading dishonorable?
Maddening
For most people, finding an answer, right or wrong, precedes recognizing that a valid question even exists.
That so many parents think children’s questions are not only tiresome but foolish when they don’t have answers.
The trading taboo was a form of security against sieges or sanctions, the idea being that it made military sense for old-time aristocrats to have self-sufficient manors or fiefdoms instead of growing dependent on outside suppliers or customers. And of course economic self-sufficiency for military reasons has often been a policy of statesmen; there is that much to be said for the idea. But otherwise it is no good because it ignores too many clues.
Personal self-respect and honor.
Trading was prudent and sensible.
Warriors posses valuable military knowledge.
But the higher a person’s military rank, the more valuable can be his potentially damaging stock in trade, as rule.
Trading secrets to the enemy is fundamentally like any trading. Both parties strike a bargain voluntarily for mutual benefit.
The precept to shun trading would still stand firm as a guardian virtue.
Bribe taking and breach of trust.
Voluntary agreement for mutual benefit. Corrupt trading
That’s one reason guardian themselves need guardians, because guardian supervisors or detectives can also be corrupt themselves, or stupid.
Exert prowess: having power and using it effectively.
Four major codes in chivalry: honor, loyalty, largesse, courtesy.
Regimes rely heavily on persuasion and custom to get their way.
Enforcement, backed up by the sheer physical power to prevail, is praiseworthy in guardian work.
Prowess links directly with obedience and discipline.
Any country is stultified and backward if it lacks inventive, enterprising commercial life.
Respect hierarchy: the chief principle of organization for guardians.
Guardians morals and values comes largely from origins in military.
Political parties are guardian entities, organized religions, they lay stress on unconditional loyalty to the faith.
Loyalty embodies a mystique transcending obedience of unbreakable fraternity, unconditional comradeship.
Children everywhere are indoctrinated with the righteousness and worthiness of their nation or empire, at considerable expense of truth.
If loyalty must be so drummed in, how did this virtue arise within cultures in the first place?
To escape mayhem from each other, armed men need bonds so strong, so highly values, so mystical that they aren’t broken under pressure of greed, or any other temptation to do in a brother-in arms.
It seems a good guess that the same organizations that gave us hierarchies, obedience, discipline, and central authority also gave us unbreakable loyalty as an ideal moral quality.
Loyalty converts from virtue to vice when the guardian precepts in the syndrome break down.
Take vengeance: the drive to retaliate packs enormous emotional power.
How and why guardians monopolize vengeance?
It’s the social contract, citizens surrender their use of force, including vengeance, for the benefits of civil peace.
He (Clark) calls the idea of a social contract intellectually attractive because it seems to reconcile the need for obedience to government with the desirable condition that government should rest on consent of the governed. But he points out that any such contract, if it existed, could not be between equals, and dismisses what he calls the halfhearted efforts of some old writers to find an ancient historical origin for a social contract. –symbolic function- the natural rights are symbolic fiction.
No answers are better than false answer**
Remember that monopolizing vengeance also means taking responsibility for doing justice. – a man armed troops forbidden to wreak private vengeance, some substitute is necessary to deal with soldier who do, in fact, inflict injuries on brother soldiers.
Successful hunting bands have a conservation ethic. They confine their activities to their needs.
Surprising potentialities.
Largesse is the guardian form of investment: specifically, investment in power, influence, and control.
It creates dependency.
Be fatalistic often encourages superstition
Honor is recognition of status and the respect owed to status.
The respect is owed, the self-respect is earned.
Honor implies moral obligations, possessions certifies that the obligations attached to a position- are admirably fulfilled.
They act on the premise that what’s right for a guardian is right for everybody.
Chapter 6 Trading, Taking, and Monstrous Hybrids
Execution is the penalty for trader. Omerta, the law of silence, is the law of unconditional loyal mutual support against outsiders.
They use their guardian morals only for self-aggrandizement and self-protection nothing else (mafia)
The mafia gets its away by illegal and corrupt uses of prowess, to please the commercial syndrome.
Shun trading: guardians were not to profit personally by trading on their positions and power.
The guardians took responsibility for commerce and production.
Rights were attached to duties, and duties to status.
If you put economic planning into guardian hands, you get planning for guardian priorities.
Make rich use of leisure: censorship and persecution of authors and artists who got out of line weren’t respectful of the arts
Because loyalty and obedience took precedence
Voluntary agreements succumbed to government edicts and plans, and competition succumbed to state monopolies. There is not much use for contractual law without private property and private commercial plans
Without competition, individual enterprise and innovation and efficiency couldn’t flourish.
Honest accounting was so little respected, or even understood, that from top to bottom nobody knew the costs of production. It didn’t matter because guardians set prices politically, without regard to costs.
But knowing when it’s appropriate to use the one or the other approach, trading or taking, and how to do it properly-those things are culturally learned, mostly by imitation and practice.
They use their guardian morals only for self-aggrandizement and self-protection nothing else (mafia)
The mafia gets its away by illegal and corrupt uses of prowess, to please the commercial syndrome.
Shun trading: guardians were not to profit personally by trading on their positions and power.
The guardians took responsibility for commerce and production.
Rights were attached to duties, and duties to status.
If you put economic planning into guardian hands, you get planning for guardian priorities.
Make rich use of leisure: censorship and persecution of authors and artists who got out of line weren’t respectful of the arts
Because loyalty and obedience took precedence
Voluntary agreements succumbed to government edicts and plans, and competition succumbed to state monopolies. There is not much use for contractual law without private property and private commercial plans
Without competition, individual enterprise and innovation and efficiency couldn’t flourish.
Honest accounting was so little respected, or even understood, that from top to bottom nobody knew the costs of production. It didn’t matter because guardians set prices politically, without regard to costs.
But knowing when it’s appropriate to use the one or the other approach, trading or taking, and how to do it properly-those things are culturally learned, mostly by imitation and practice.
Chapter 7 Anomalies
When physicians pretend to be at the service of patients but are actually serving the state.Morality is the line between the guardian and commercial syndromes
Private practice of the law
Discovery part of the process
Money materializing
Commercial arrangements
Moral patterns
Pretending undying loyalty was part of the slaves’ own survival system within this guardian world
The artist’s love for the art is the energy that drives artistic creation.
Not everything we do, or everything we are, can be bracketed within trading and taking.
Private practice of the law
Discovery part of the process
Money materializing
Commercial arrangements
Moral patterns
Pretending undying loyalty was part of the slaves’ own survival system within this guardian world
The artist’s love for the art is the energy that drives artistic creation.
Not everything we do, or everything we are, can be bracketed within trading and taking.
Chapter 8 Cast of Minds
Education does not guarantee a cast of mind appropriate to the training.
Free intellectual inquiry
Yet the guardian assumptions, the guardian cast of mind, governed the root questions they were putting themselves.
Zero-sum thinking
Francis bacon: the increase of any state must be upon the foreigner
The guardian and commercial cast of mind exist and that they can have practical consequences.
Next chapter Armbuster will explain why crazy things happen systematically when either moral syndrome- guardian or commercial-embraces function inappropriate to it.
Free intellectual inquiry
Yet the guardian assumptions, the guardian cast of mind, governed the root questions they were putting themselves.
Zero-sum thinking
Francis bacon: the increase of any state must be upon the foreigner
The guardian and commercial cast of mind exist and that they can have practical consequences.
Next chapter Armbuster will explain why crazy things happen systematically when either moral syndrome- guardian or commercial-embraces function inappropriate to it.
Chapter 9 Armbruster on Systemic Moral Corruption
The normal commercial virtues of competitiveness, industrious, and efficiency made matters worse. Under the circumstances, those normal virtues automatically converted to vices.
Any significant breach of a syndrome’s integrity- usually by adopting an inappropriate function-causes some normal virtues to convert automatically to vices, and still others to bend and break for necessary expedience. A systematic process of intractable corruption.
In groups and when in office men frequently act out of character- moral character- as though driven by an extraneous force.. a power hidden behind the circumstances.
Self-organizing systems
Masters of deception
The law of the jungle, isn’t conducive to human survival when the locale is wilderness.
The key system corrupted was investment banking. That organizes and underwrites issues of stocks and bonds for corporations and bonds for governments and puts them on the market.
Investment only by customers
Investment banking should be defined only by customer needs and our imagination in meeting those needs.- commercial morality
Competition converting to vice
Trained incompetence has the abilities of most of the country’s best and brightest engineers over the span of the past forty years. – cost of discipline, efficiency and productivity
Trouble comes from inability to produce the inventions at affordable costs and with competitive efficiency
They assume they could improve the guardian syndome by plucking industriousness from the commercial syndrome and disregarding tradition in their guardian syndrome.
Picking and choosing as we please from precepts in the two syndromes and mixing them up together breeds endless chains of injustice: great wickedness, great harm.
Justice is to perform’s one’s own task and not to meddle with that of others. Plato’s point was the need to maintain the integrity of the morals and functions associated with the two great classes of work he identified.
Socratic trick: starting with an extreme simplicity as his springboard for arguing a complexity.
Syndrome-friendly tinkering.
The government’s role was to legalize the system and take normal policing responsibility against corruption, embezzlement, fraud, or the like.
Copyright collective systems
Symbiosis without corruption.
A mess intrinsic to the human duality of ways and means, which has been spared the other animals. But being a commercial sort of person, there’s hope.
Any significant breach of a syndrome’s integrity- usually by adopting an inappropriate function-causes some normal virtues to convert automatically to vices, and still others to bend and break for necessary expedience. A systematic process of intractable corruption.
In groups and when in office men frequently act out of character- moral character- as though driven by an extraneous force.. a power hidden behind the circumstances.
Self-organizing systems
Masters of deception
The law of the jungle, isn’t conducive to human survival when the locale is wilderness.
The key system corrupted was investment banking. That organizes and underwrites issues of stocks and bonds for corporations and bonds for governments and puts them on the market.
Investment only by customers
Investment banking should be defined only by customer needs and our imagination in meeting those needs.- commercial morality
Competition converting to vice
Trained incompetence has the abilities of most of the country’s best and brightest engineers over the span of the past forty years. – cost of discipline, efficiency and productivity
Trouble comes from inability to produce the inventions at affordable costs and with competitive efficiency
They assume they could improve the guardian syndome by plucking industriousness from the commercial syndrome and disregarding tradition in their guardian syndrome.
Picking and choosing as we please from precepts in the two syndromes and mixing them up together breeds endless chains of injustice: great wickedness, great harm.
Justice is to perform’s one’s own task and not to meddle with that of others. Plato’s point was the need to maintain the integrity of the morals and functions associated with the two great classes of work he identified.
Socratic trick: starting with an extreme simplicity as his springboard for arguing a complexity.
Syndrome-friendly tinkering.
The government’s role was to legalize the system and take normal policing responsibility against corruption, embezzlement, fraud, or the like.
Copyright collective systems
Symbiosis without corruption.
A mess intrinsic to the human duality of ways and means, which has been spared the other animals. But being a commercial sort of person, there’s hope.
Chapter 10 Syndrome- Friendly Inventions
When a micro-enterprise grows large enough to have employees other than family members it becomes an individual borrower.
Mutual responsibility, businesslike methods, and generation of new capital for productive investment as by-product of commercial success.
Savings for purchasers were part of Alana's vision from the beginning because her conception included helping buyers improve their competitive positions.
The great principle of self-regeneration runs through all the examples of syndrome-friendly inventions or tinkerings for guardian work. How guardians can use their syndrome, while maintaining their syndrome.
"We guardians are decreeing you must do such-and-such, but you have to figure out for yourselves the ways and means to comply". An invitation to go ahead, and by using their own ways, and means, make the most of their opportunity.
Hong Kong do it yourself development- intelligent push
Here's what you commercial people have to do and we'll enforce it, but how you comply is your responsibility. Find your own commercial ways and means.
The most horrendous guardian aggrandizment of commercial ways and means has been tje promotion of nuclear power to generating electricity.
No private company would accept without huge guarantees from the government...
Guardians have so many important and legitimate responsibilities, ones hat nobody can attend to properly if they don't.
How to handle new types of territorial problems as they emerge, if solutions depend on commercial behavior.
Mutual responsibility, businesslike methods, and generation of new capital for productive investment as by-product of commercial success.
Savings for purchasers were part of Alana's vision from the beginning because her conception included helping buyers improve their competitive positions.
The great principle of self-regeneration runs through all the examples of syndrome-friendly inventions or tinkerings for guardian work. How guardians can use their syndrome, while maintaining their syndrome.
"We guardians are decreeing you must do such-and-such, but you have to figure out for yourselves the ways and means to comply". An invitation to go ahead, and by using their own ways, and means, make the most of their opportunity.
Hong Kong do it yourself development- intelligent push
Here's what you commercial people have to do and we'll enforce it, but how you comply is your responsibility. Find your own commercial ways and means.
The most horrendous guardian aggrandizment of commercial ways and means has been tje promotion of nuclear power to generating electricity.
No private company would accept without huge guarantees from the government...
Guardians have so many important and legitimate responsibilities, ones hat nobody can attend to properly if they don't.
How to handle new types of territorial problems as they emerge, if solutions depend on commercial behavior.
Chapter 11 Hortense on Castes and Flexibility
Our society bases itself on knowledgeable flexibility.
Guardians were to be so unsullied by property and trade, they were to own nothing as individuals.
Japn the castes was like this:
Kuge (heridtary supervisors of ancestor worship and the general moral direction of policy and propriety)
Samurai (hereditary guardians)
Trade was forbidden from this above
Farmers
Artisans
Merchants
Power-riggin! Caste and class are tricks and oppressions to keep top dogs on top!
The enigma of genteel poverty
"It sounds to me as if occupational castes were a way stage in our social and economic evolution," "Useful once upon a time but long since outgrown".
Rulers must be subjected to the law.
"Racism creates castes. But not necessarily as a way of separating guardian and commercial occupations, the kind of caste I've described. Racism, like gender discrimination, lacks that one mitigating advantage; it penalizes its victims in all manner of occupations. It has no moral purpose of defending the syndromes from corruption by preventing them from mingling. The flexible the knowledgable method of separating the syndromes doesn't ordain children for occupational destinies that they stick with all their lives. It permits individuals to do either guardian or commercial work without regard to birth or upbringing; also to shift between the two, as when a businessman runs for political office or a former soldier becomes a commercial accountant or a carpenter.
Individuals must be morally flexible enough to adapt to either syndrome as need be, and knowledgeable enough to know the difference.
The test for a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
Guardians were to be so unsullied by property and trade, they were to own nothing as individuals.
Japn the castes was like this:
Kuge (heridtary supervisors of ancestor worship and the general moral direction of policy and propriety)
Samurai (hereditary guardians)
Trade was forbidden from this above
Farmers
Artisans
Merchants
Power-riggin! Caste and class are tricks and oppressions to keep top dogs on top!
The enigma of genteel poverty
"It sounds to me as if occupational castes were a way stage in our social and economic evolution," "Useful once upon a time but long since outgrown".
Rulers must be subjected to the law.
"Racism creates castes. But not necessarily as a way of separating guardian and commercial occupations, the kind of caste I've described. Racism, like gender discrimination, lacks that one mitigating advantage; it penalizes its victims in all manner of occupations. It has no moral purpose of defending the syndromes from corruption by preventing them from mingling. The flexible the knowledgable method of separating the syndromes doesn't ordain children for occupational destinies that they stick with all their lives. It permits individuals to do either guardian or commercial work without regard to birth or upbringing; also to shift between the two, as when a businessman runs for political office or a former soldier becomes a commercial accountant or a carpenter.
Individuals must be morally flexible enough to adapt to either syndrome as need be, and knowledgeable enough to know the difference.
The test for a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
Chapter 12 Pitfalls of the Methods
For us truth is made up of many bits and pieces of reality. The flux and change in itself is of the essence. Change is so major a truth that we understand process to be the essence of things.
Plato-Process of ending and process of becoming, occurring simultaneously, delude us with an illusion of stability.
He though fire was the primary substance and the soul itself was fire. In the sense that vitality is a manifestation of transformations of energy, also that the source of that energy is the fire of the sun.
Master virtue is cooperation, because we're social animals. Cooperation turns rancid when it becomes cooperation with immorality or with inappropriate functions and values.
Sometimes falling into bad company and going along with it doesn't entail personal wrongdoing. Just the same, it blurs moral understanding, entails loss of bearings.
In a corrupt context, the moral and scrupulous man or woman is a misfit.
It's supposed to be the job of the guardians, but the guardians are doing the same things themselves, randomly breaching their syndrome in their own organizations, converting virtues to vices and becoming morally blurry.
He proposes invoking wholesome cooperation to combat rancid cooperation.
Self-governace is really a public relations strategy.
They need self- examination and moral awareness as much as commercial enterprises do, and managers in the bureaucracies can feel as morally alone as commercial managers.
Plato-Process of ending and process of becoming, occurring simultaneously, delude us with an illusion of stability.
He though fire was the primary substance and the soul itself was fire. In the sense that vitality is a manifestation of transformations of energy, also that the source of that energy is the fire of the sun.
Master virtue is cooperation, because we're social animals. Cooperation turns rancid when it becomes cooperation with immorality or with inappropriate functions and values.
Sometimes falling into bad company and going along with it doesn't entail personal wrongdoing. Just the same, it blurs moral understanding, entails loss of bearings.
In a corrupt context, the moral and scrupulous man or woman is a misfit.
It's supposed to be the job of the guardians, but the guardians are doing the same things themselves, randomly breaching their syndrome in their own organizations, converting virtues to vices and becoming morally blurry.
He proposes invoking wholesome cooperation to combat rancid cooperation.
Self-governace is really a public relations strategy.
They need self- examination and moral awareness as much as commercial enterprises do, and managers in the bureaucracies can feel as morally alone as commercial managers.
Chapter 13 Hortense's Defense of Moral Flexibility
This work demands the guardian syndrome, especially the precept to shun trading. Yet great numbers of people who take on public responsibilities part time happen to make their living in commercial work. Therefore they must be flexible and knowledgeable enough to understand the differences and abide by them.
It is ordinary for the same individual to do both guardian and commercial work, yet keep the two distinct.
The union leadership is always guardian, if it sells out the workers, that's corrupt.
You're saying the leadership must keep its eye on getting a fair share of the pie for members, a guardian concern. "But it has to recognize the members are making pies, a commercial preoccupation with all that this entails morally. Two cast of mind here, and both the union leadership and the company leadership need knowledge of both syndromes and respect for the integrity of both.
To the point that individuals can knowledgeably shift between the two syndromes if a change in job demands it.
Governments have to let contracts, buy goods and services for their own needs and other clearly public purposes.
How good would guardians be at legislating and policing against monopolies if they ignore or take lightly the necessity of commercial competition?
Most important reason for thinking it valuable is this: if it's true we're the only creatures with two fundamentally different ways of getting a living, it follows that to be as fully human as we can be, we should all be capable of using our two syndromes well. They belong to all of us because we're human, no other reason. They don't merely belong to this or that ordained group, as if we were social insects.
Society itself is the bedrock of society, and it's also the bedrock of the family, not the reverse. "Families are fragments of their societies. The bedrock are the ways people get their livings, and the institutions and organization formed to that end; guardian and commercial.
If a society's means of getting its livings are stagnant over a long period of time, the forms its families have taken remain stagnant too. Erroneous conclusion because as soon as such a society experiences economic changes, its families changes in response, maybe for better, maybe worse.
Good personal character- responsibility, capacity to resist harmful temptations, compassion, courage.
It is ordinary for the same individual to do both guardian and commercial work, yet keep the two distinct.
The union leadership is always guardian, if it sells out the workers, that's corrupt.
You're saying the leadership must keep its eye on getting a fair share of the pie for members, a guardian concern. "But it has to recognize the members are making pies, a commercial preoccupation with all that this entails morally. Two cast of mind here, and both the union leadership and the company leadership need knowledge of both syndromes and respect for the integrity of both.
To the point that individuals can knowledgeably shift between the two syndromes if a change in job demands it.
Governments have to let contracts, buy goods and services for their own needs and other clearly public purposes.
How good would guardians be at legislating and policing against monopolies if they ignore or take lightly the necessity of commercial competition?
Most important reason for thinking it valuable is this: if it's true we're the only creatures with two fundamentally different ways of getting a living, it follows that to be as fully human as we can be, we should all be capable of using our two syndromes well. They belong to all of us because we're human, no other reason. They don't merely belong to this or that ordained group, as if we were social insects.
Society itself is the bedrock of society, and it's also the bedrock of the family, not the reverse. "Families are fragments of their societies. The bedrock are the ways people get their livings, and the institutions and organization formed to that end; guardian and commercial.
If a society's means of getting its livings are stagnant over a long period of time, the forms its families have taken remain stagnant too. Erroneous conclusion because as soon as such a society experiences economic changes, its families changes in response, maybe for better, maybe worse.
Good personal character- responsibility, capacity to resist harmful temptations, compassion, courage.
Chapter 14 Plans and Champagne
When Armburster asked Jasper what were his plans afterwards I liked how we answered him, first acknowledging him for the opportunity and the reason of why he accepted because it was to learn why he was bored, which he said he was bored with repeating himself.
"I realized that most of us after our formative year resist revising our views of how the world works"- This is completely in accordance with most of grown-ups now that they think they've already reached truth, and they are comfortable with it.
"I realized that most of us after our formative year resist revising our views of how the world works"- This is completely in accordance with most of grown-ups now that they think they've already reached truth, and they are comfortable with it.