“I’m not antimilitary. But the evidence is strong that education is often a far better investment than artillery.”
“Latin countries generally do well in happiness surveys. Mexico and Colombia rank higher than the United States in self-reported contentment. Perhaps one reason is a cultural emphasis on family and friends, on social capital over financial capital”
More than a decade ago, Jerry Porras and Jim Collins cited research from which they concluded that leaders who last and make a lasting difference have the exceptional ability to deal with paradoxes and seeming contradictions rather than yielding to the “tyranny of the ‘or.’” This is the tyranny that pushes people to believe that things must be either A or B, but not both.”
“While it may sound too good to be true, it is often possible to embrace both extremes of many apparent contradictions simultaneously. If we are willing to do some hard cognitive work and lay aside pure selfishness, we can find ways to have the best of both worlds.”
“In a monoculture, it’s impossible to create any subculture that stands in opposition to the mainstream … because the mainstream simply appropriates it. I’m not talking about appropriation in the corporate/capitalist sense, where the signifiers of alternative culture are used to sell everything from German cars to Tom’s of Maine toothpaste. That’s nothing new. What’s weird about the monoculture is that it actually embraces subcultures and makes them part of the global mainstream at a far greater speed than has ever been achieved before. Even anti-consumerism is acceptable; check out the circulation of Adbusters in any given month.”