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The stricter standards and independent, often conclusive, evidence in the physical sciences cannot be generalized to intellectual activity as a whole, even though the aura of scientific processes and results is often appropriated by other intellectuals.
Topic: Psychological Subjects
Source: None
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Knowledge can be enormously costly, and is often scattered in widely uneven fragments, too small to be individually usable in decision making. The communication and coordination of these scattered fragments of knowledge is one of the basic problems- perhaps the basic problem- of any society.
Topic: Psychological Subjects
Source: None
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Social values in general are incrementally variable: neither safety, diversity, rational articulation, nor morality is categorically a "good thing" to have more of, without limits. All are subject to diminishing returns, and ultimately negative returns.
Topic: Psychological Subjects
Source: None
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Implicit in the activist conception of government is the assumption that you can take the good things in a complex system for granted, and just improve the things that are not so good. What is lacking in this conception is any sense that a society, an institution, or even a single human being, is an intricate system of fragile inter-relationships, whose complexities are little understood and easily destabilized.
Topic: Psychological Subjects
Source: None
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Informal relationships are not mere minor interstitial supplements to the major institutions of society. These informal relationships not only include important decision-making processes, such as the family, but also produce much of the background social capital without which the other major institutions of society could not function nearly as effectively as they do.
Topic: Psychological Subjects
Source: None
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The most basic inherent constraint is that neither time nor wisdom are free goods available in unlimited quantity. This means that in social processes, as in economic processes, it is not only impossible to attain perfection but irrational to seek perfection- or even to seek the "best possible" result in each separate instance.
Topic: Psychological Subjects
Source: None
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Nothing as mundane as mere evidence can be allowed to threaten a vision so deeply satisfying.
Topic: Religion / Beliefs
Source: None
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Various kinds of ideas can be classified by their relationship to the authentication process. There are ideas systematically prepared for authentication ("theories"), ideas not derived from any systematic process ("visions"), ideas which could not survive any reasonable authentication process ("illusions"), ideas which exempt themselves from any authentication process ("myths"), ideas which have already passed authentication processes ("facts"), as well as ideas known to have failed- or certain to fail- such processes ("falsehoods" - both mistakes and lies).
Topic: Religion / Beliefs
Source: None
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The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy "solutions" that get rid of the whole problem- at least in their imagination.
Topic: Society
Source: None
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...each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
Topic: Society
Source: None
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Cultures contain many cues and inducements to dissuade the individual from approaching ultimate limits, in much the same way that a special warning strip of land around the edge of a baseball field lets a player know that he is about to run into a concrete wall when he is preoccupied with catching the ball. The wider that strip of land and the more sensitive the player is to the changing composition of the ground under his feet as he pursues the ball, the more effective the warning. Romanticizing or lionizing as "individualistic" those people who disregard social cues and inducements increases the danger of head-on collisions with inherent social limits. Decrying various forms of social disapproval is in effect narrowing the warning strip.
Topic: Society
Source: None
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The demands of unbounded individualism need to be weighed in the light of inherent social constraints which can only change their form but cannot be eliminated without eliminating civilization.
Topic: Society
Source: None
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Where intellectuals have played a role in history, it has not been so much by whispering words of advice into the ears of political overlords as by contributing to the vast and powerful currents of conceptions and misconceptions that sweep human action along.
Topic: Society
Source: None
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Much of what sophisticates loftily refer to as the "complexity" of the real world is in fact the inconsistency in their own minds.
Topic: Society
Source: None
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Facts do not "speak for themselves." They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
Topic: Society
Source: None
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Fundamentalist religion is the most pervasive vision of central planning, though many fundamentalists may oppose human central planning as a usurpation or "playing God." This is consistent with the fundamentalist vision of an unconstrained God and a highly constrained man.
Topic: Society
Source: None
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It's amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.
Topic: Society
Source: None
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People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.
Topic: Society
Source: None
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The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.
Topic: Society
Source: None
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Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.
Topic: Society
Source: None
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Morality, like other inputs into the social process, follows the law of diminishing returns- meaning ultimately, negative returns. People can be too moral.
Topic: Society
Source: None
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Unbounded morality ultimately becomes counterproductive even in terms of the same moral principles being sought. The law of diminishing returns applies to morality.
Topic: Society
Source: None
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There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.
Topic: Society
Source: None
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