thoughts

For Lee Kuan Yew,26 the aspirational ideal was to become, as Confucius urged more than two thousand years ago, a junzi, which has been variously translated as an “exemplary person,” or “gentleman.” This was someone who is27 “loyal to his father and mother,” “faithful to his wife,” “brings up his children well,” and is a “loyal citizen of his empero

The preconditions for a durable peace often come only from a credible threat of war.

True enough—but sacrifice and murder would not lend themselves to this game of reciprocal substitution if they were not in some way related.

1. Violation of any equilibrium-of-worthlessness condition creates expectations of value.


2. Expectations lead to score-keeping. Freedom-to-keep-playing is replaced by freedom-to-win.


3. Score-keeping and freedom-to-win leads to privileging of some behaviors as as more worth-while (notice the time-value connotations of the term).


4. Privileged behaviors — capabil

As Manuel Castells Oliván,2 a Spanish sociologist, has written, “Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local.”

The act of rebellion that involves building something from nothing—whether it is a poem from a blank page, a painting from a canvas, or software code on a screen—by definition requires a rejection of what has come before. It involves the bracing conclusion that something new is necessary. The hubris involved in the act of creation—that determinatio

It is true, of course, that purportedly neutral or innocent aesthetic decisions are often means of constructing and maintaining caste hierarchies.