Sublime

For most of the 2020s, the driving economic force will be low growth in productivity, decreased opportunities for investment of accumulated capital, and low interest rates. It will also be a period of increasing unemployment, driven by continued decline in industry and stagnation in high tech as the result of the maturation of the core technology.

In the new millennium, economic and political life will no longer be organized on a gigantic scale under the domination of the nation-state as it was during the modern centuries. The civilization that brought you world war, the assembly line, social security, income tax, deodorant, and the toaster oven is dying. Deodorant and the toaster oven may s

CIA assessment,

The founders speak of three rights: the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The source for this phrase was John Locke, a British philosopher who spoke of “the right to life, liberty, and property.”

Nick Bostrom

his fundamental conviction has remained constant: the horrors of late twentieth-century life, whether Nazi, communist, racist, nationalist, or utilitarian in expression, are the products of defective concepts of the human person.

Le grand principe, le principe dominant auquel aboutissent tous les arguments exposés dans ces pages, est l’importance essentielle et absolue du développement humain dans sa plus riche diversité. (Wilhelm von Humboldt : De la sphère et des devoirs du gouvernement.)

The idea of freedom ‘thus degenerates into a mere advocacy of free enterprise’, which means ‘the fullness of freedom for those whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance of liberty for the people, who may in vain attempt to make use of their democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property’.