PYTHAGORUS IN BOOTS

Johan Cruyff
cerrar at fotolog

Ever heard the phrase “total football”? Put simply, it means all 10 outfield players in a team are comfortable in any position. So if a defender wants to go on a mazy run towards goal, a midfielder will fill in for him at the back – and stay there. It may sound crazy, but it was a style of play that made Holland the greatest side of the 1970s. The brains behind it all was the Dutch captain and Ajax star player – Johan Cruyff. With two fabulous feet and mesmeric ball skills, Cruyff was at the heart of everything Holland did – literally. All 15 of their goals in the 1974 World Cup either started or ended with the captain.
Cruyff was mainly an attacking midfielder, but he popped up all over the pitch, conducting some of the most stunning football ever seen. The Dutch passed the ball so well that opponents sometimes spent minutes without getting a touch!
Cruyff’s finest moment was in a group match against Sweden. With a defender niggling him on the touchline, Cruyff’s left foot flicked the ball back behind his own right leg. The hapless full-back tackled at thin air and ran off in the wrong direction – looking very confused! The “Cruyff turn” was born. As far as we know, he’s the only player to have a trick named after him!
(BBC)

Bayern Munich vs Ajax Amsterdam
Franz Baeckenbauer and Johan Cruyff
From postadelgufo.it

Cruyff came to dominate European and World football in the 1970s and was seen by many as the natural successor to Pele. He played in three winning European Cup teams with Ajax of Amsterdan and was three times European Footballer of the Year. At their peak, the Holland side, of which he was captain, were the most exciting and talented team in international football, yet, strangely, they never won a major trophy. In 1999 Cruyff was named European Footballer of the Century ahead of Franz Beckenbauer and Alfredo di Stefano.
Cruyff was born close to the Ajax ground in Amsterdam in April 1947. His mother worked as a cleaner at the club and it was she who persuaded the coaches to admit her son to the Ajax youth scheme at the age of 12. Cruyff made his senior debut for Ajax when he was 17. Two years later he was playing for Holland. Cruyff was a powerful, long-striding runner who had wonderful balance, deadly speed and breathtaking ball control. But his greatest quality was vision. It sometimes seemed as if he was able to control a match from one end of the field to the other.
(Laureus)
In 1973 Cruyff left Ajax to join Barcelona for a then world record transfer fee of 75 million pesetas (£922,000). When Cruyff arrived, Barcelona were struggling. The effect of his influence was extraordinary and they finished as Spanish Champions. The World Cup of 1974 in West Germany saw the Holland team, led by Cruyff, at the height of their majestic powers. They reached the World Cup Final, but lost to West Germany, only the second time the Dutch had been beaten in 24 matches. It was also the first and only time that Cruyff was to appear in the World Cup Finals. In total, Cruyff played 48 games for Holland and scored a record 33 goals.
(Laureus)
Cruyff was the captain of Holland and received comparisons to Pele during the tournament in West Germany. His breathtaking display was there for all to see, scoring and creating goals. Cruyff gave a performance in his World Cup debut against Uruguay that the spectators could hardly forget. Accelarating and turning away from opponents, Cruyff created havoc in the South American defence. He combined with Suurbier to set up Rep and also scored a disallowed ‘goal’. Holland had a goalless draw against Sweden. But in the next game, Cruyff gave his greatest performance in the World Cup. First, he was fouled in the penalty area by a Bulgarian defender that led to Neeskens’ penalty goal. Next, his free-kick set up Rep. He completed a remarkable performance by playing a left-wing cross for De Jong to apply a beautiful diving header and complete the rout.
(World-Cup-Betting-2006)
Cruyff continued his breath-taking form in the quarter-final against Argentina, scoring two superb goals, one of them after dancing beautifully past Argentine goalkeeper Carnevali. And just like in the previous game, he provided another deadly cross for Rep to score the final goal of the 4-0 victory. Holland beat East Germany easily and met Brazil in the match which decides who will go to the Final.
In a bad-tempered match, Cruyff’s majestic skills proved decisive. First he laid the ball back for Neeskens to finish powerfully. Next came perhaps the Dutch master’s greatest goal in the World Cup. Running like a leopard from midfield, he connected with Neeskens’ cross in front of Brazil’s goal and volleyed home a superb clinching goal that spelled an end to Brazil’s dominance of world football.
(World-Cup-Betting-2006)

The “Cruyff turn”
Berti Vogts and Cruyff, 1974
From World-Cup-Betting-2006

With Cruyff in such dangerous form, West Germany’s manager Helmut Schoen assigned Berti Vogts, the greatest marker of his generation, to man-mark Cruyff in the Final. But Cruyff still inspired Holland’s first goal, darting through the Dutch defence before being brought down by Hoeness. However, West Germany’s resilience brought them two goals. And with Cruyff distracted by arguments with the referee (he also received a yellow card for that), Holland failed to come back in the second half and lost the World Cup to Germany.
Still a top player 4 years later, Cruyff announced his international retirement shortly before the 1978 World Cup. Some speculated he was threatened by terrorists from Argentina.
(World-Cup-Betting-2006)
Johann Cruyff’s decision to miss the 1978 World Cup has long been attributed to his reluctance to give a propaganda coup to the military junta that controlled Argentina at the time, but the Dutch master later revealed that there was another reason for his refusal to travel: a kidnap attempt during which he and his family were threatened with a rifle.
Cruyff told Radio Cataluyna that the attempt occurred in Barcelona in 1977. “I had a rifle at my head, I was tied up, my wife tied up, the children were in the apartment in Barcelona,” he said. The former player did not explain how the ordeal ended, but said his house was placed under police protection for the next four months and that guards thereafter accompanied his children to and from school. He said concern for his family meant he did not feel able to help Holland at the World Cup. “To play a World Cup you have to be 200%,” said Cruyff. “There are moments when there are other values in life.”
Cruyff, widely acclaimed as the finest player of his generation, retired from international football in 1977 after helping the country qualify for the 1978 torunament where, without him, Holland again reached the final – and again lost to the hosts.
(Paul Doyle guardian.co.uk)
Cruyff also played for New York Cosmos, Los Angeles Aztecs, Washington Diplomats, Levante, a minor Spanish club, Ajax again and Feyenoord of Rotterdam, before he was hired as coach of Ajax. He won the 1987 European Cup Winners’ Cup, before moving back to Barcelona where in 1992 he brought to Spain the greatest prize, the European Cup. By 1994 Barcelona had won four successive Spanish Championships, but the strain was beginning to tell. Cruyff had undergone surgery after suffering a heart attack and in 1996 he left Barcelona.
(Laureus)
Johan Cruyff has revealed the strategy that saw him lay down the foundations for the system that has brought Barcelona so much success over the past two decades. The Dutch legend created the Blaugrana Dream Team of the early 1990’s that won four consecutive league titles and the European Cup by employing the familiar 4-3-3 system.
That formation has continued under proceeding coaches, including Louis van Gaal, before Pep Guardiola took it on and adapted it further and now Cruyff has explained how he came up with the idea.
“I come from a mentality where good football predominates, beyond the result,” he told Barca TV. “The result is not everything, only a part and playing good football is the key.
“For me the basis of football is technique and possession. I always want to have the ball, dominate and do what I want on the pitch. I never adapt to others. This is the most difficult football to play.
“There are no stars that shine more than the others. They’re all stars and everyone has to carry out their obligations. Somebody will be better on one day and somebody else the next, but it all has to come together in a single team, never in a team of individuals. I’ve always put the team above the individual. If the team works, the star is on top of all.
“It’s true that football also has strategy. If I see that a team has a full-back with certain characteristics, I’ll play a winger who can beat him. But all the decisions you can take before a match stay up in the air because you never know how the other team will play.
“You can apply the strategy as you go, after seeing how the match is going after five minutes and you make the changes you believe are appropriate,” he concluded.
(Lucas Brown, Goal.com)
Cruyff had grown into a powerful, long- striding athlete. He had wonderful balance, deadly speed and breathtaking ball control. But his greatest quality was vision, based on an acute sense of his team-mates’ positions as an attack unfolded.
The sports writer David Miller believed Cruyff superior to any previous player in his ability to extract the most from others. He dubbed him “Pythagorus in boots” for the complexity and precision of his angled passes and wrote : ” Few have been able to exact, both physically and mentally, such mesmeric control on a match from one penalty area to another. ”
His one fault was a questionable temperament which, at times, threatened to undermine his ability. His outspoken nature often led him into trouble, such as when he was sent off against Czechoslovakia in only his second international match and suspended from the Dutch team for a year. Cruyff’s team-mates at Ajax included Piet Keizer, Wim Suurbier and Barry Hulshoff – all of whom were to play in four European Cup Finals. But there was no doubting who was the star among stars.
(Barrie Spirit Soccer)

Achievements as player:

Ajax:
Eredivisie: 1966, 1967, 1968, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1982, 1983
KNVB Cup: 1967, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1983
European Cup: 1971, 1972, 1973
Intercontinental Cup: 1972
UEFA Super Cup: 1972, 1973
Intertoto Cup: 1968
Barcelona:
La Liga: 1974
Copa del Rey: 1978
Feyenoord:
Eredivisie: 1984
KNVB Cup: 1984
European Player of the Century XX IFFHS
Golden Player of the Netherlands

Achievements as manager
Ajax:
KNVB Cup: 1986, 1987
UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup: 1987
Barcelona:
Copa del Rey: 1990
La Liga: 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup: 1989
European Cup: 1992
UEFA Super Cup: 1992

Achievements as individual:
European Footballer of the Year (3): 1971, 1973, 1974
FIFA World Cup Golden Ball: 1974
FIFA World Cup All-Star Team: 1974
Don Balón Award for Foreign Player of the Year in La Liga (2): 1977, 1978
Dutch Golden Shoe: 1984
World Soccer Awards Manager of the Year: 1987
Don Balón Award for Coach of the Year in La Liga (2): 1991, 1992
Onze d’Or for Coach of the Year (2): 1992, 1994
(From Wikimedia)

Honours list:
Knight in the Order of Oranje Nassau
Since 8 juli 1974
Silver medal of the City of Amsterdam
November 1978
Honorary member of the KNVB
28 oktober 1978; presented at Cruijff’s retirement November 7th 1978
Mark of honour of the city of Los Angeles
December 1979
Sport and Trade Award Ministerie van WVC
July 1992
Honorary member Ajax
7 April 1999
(From Barrie Spirit Soccer)

THE MAKING OF ARGUMENTS

As we pass through life our actions and our interest in the people and things we meet are fixed in the first place by the spontaneous movements of feeling, and in the second place, and constantly more so as we grow older, by our reasoning powers. The actions of all men are the resultant of these two forces of feeling and reason.
There are many political speeches, whose only object is to make things uncomfortable for the other side, and some speeches in college or school debates intended merely to trip up the other side; and neither type helps to clear up the subjects it deals with. On the other hand, we spend many a pleasant evening arguing whether science is more important in education than literature, or whether it is better to spend the summer at the seashore or in the mountains, or similar subjects, where we know that everybody will stand at the end just where he stood at the beginning. Our real purpose is not to change any one’s views so much as it is to exchange thoughts and likings with someone we know and care for. The purpose of argument, as we shall understand the word here, is to convince or persuade someone.
Arguments of policy which argue what ought to be done, make their appeal in the main to the moral, practical, or aesthetic interests of the audience. These interests have their ultimate roots in the deep-seated mass of inherited temperamental motives and forces which may be summed up here in the conveniently vague term “feeling.” These motives and forces, it will be noticed, lie outside the field of reason, and are in the main recalcitrant to it. When you argue that it is “right” that rich men should endow the schools and colleges of this country, you would find it impossible to explain in detail just what you mean by “right”; your belief rises from feelings, partly inherited, partly drawn in with the air of the country, which make you positive of your assertion even when you can least give reasons for it. So our practical interests turn in the end on what we want and do not want, and are therefore molded by our temperament and tastes, which are obviously matters of feeling. Our aesthetic interests, who include our preferences in all the fields of art and literature and things beautiful or ugly in daily life, even more obviously go back to feeling. Now in practical life our will to do anything is latent until some part of this great body of feeling is stirred; therefore arguments of policy, which aim to show that something ought to be done, cannot neglect feeling.
An important practical difference between arguments of fact and arguments of policy lies in the different form and degree of certitude to which they lead. At the end of arguments of fact it is possible to say, if enough evidence can be had, “This is undeniably true.” In these arguments we can use the word “proof” in its strict sense. In arguments of policy on the other hand, where the question is worth arguing, we know in many cases that in the end there will be men who are as wise and as upright as ourselves who will continue to disagree. In such cases it is obvious that we can use the word “proof” only loosely; and we speak of right or of expediency rather than of truth. This distinction is worth bearing in mind, for it leads to soberness and a seemly modesty in controversy. It is only in barber-shop politics and sophomore debating clubs that a decision of a question of policy takes its place among the eternal verities.
In arguments of fact, it will be noticed; there is little or no element of persuasion, for we deal with such matters almost wholly through our understanding and reason. Huxley, in his argument on evolution, which was addressed to a popular audience, was careful to choose examples that would be familiar; but his treatment of the subject was strictly expository in tone. In some arguments of this sort, which touch on the great forces of the universe and on the nature of the world of life of which we are an infinitesimal part, the tone of the discourse will take on warmth and eloquence…..
The chief danger when you reason through the method of agreement is of jumping to a conclusion too soon, and before you have collected enough cases for a safe conclusion. This is to commit the fallacy known as hasty generalization. It is the error committed by the dogmatic sort of globetrotter, who after six weeks spent in Swiss-managed hotels in Italy will supply you with a full set of opinions on the government, morals, and customs of the country.
When one has to refute an argument in which there is faulty generalization, it is often easy to point out that its author had no sufficient time or chance to make observations, or to point out that the instances on which he relied are not fair examples of their class. In practice the strength of an argument in which this error is to be found lies largely in the costiveness with which it is pronounced; for it is human nature to accept opinions which have an outward appearance of certainty.
A not uncommon form of faulty generalization is to base an argument on a mere enumeration of similar cases. This is a poor foundation for an argument, especially for a probability in the future, unless the enumeration approaches an exhaustive list of all possible cases. To have reasoned a few years ago that because Yale had beaten Harvard at rowing almost every year for fifteen years it had a permanent superiority in the strength and skill of its oarsmen would have been dangerous, for when the years before the given period were looked up they would have shown results the other way. And an enumeration may run through a very long period of time, and still in the end be upset.
To an inhabitant of Central Africa fifty years ago, no fact probably appeared to rest on more uniform experience than this, that all human beings are black. To Europeans not many years ago, the proposition, ‘All swans are white,’ appeared an equally unequivocal instance of uniformity in the course of nature. Further experience has proved to both that they were mistaken; but they had to wait fifty centuries for this experience. During that long time, mankind believed in a uniformity of the course of nature where no such uniformity really existed.
Unless you have so wide and complete a view of your subject that you can practically insure your enumeration as exhaustive, it is not safe to reason that because a thing has always happened so in the past, it will always happen so in the future. The notorious difficulty of proving a negative goes back to this principle.
Of the errors in reasoning about a cause none is more common than that known by the older logic as post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore on account of it), or more briefly, the post hoc fallacy. All of us who have a pet remedy for a cold probably commit this fallacy two times out of three when we declare that our quinine or rhinitis or camphor pill has cured us; for as a wise old doctor of two generations ago declared, and as the new doctrines of medical research are making clear, in nine cases out of ten nature cures.
Of the same character are the common superstitions of daily life, for example, that if thirteen sit at table together one will die within the year, or that crossing a funeral procession brings misfortune. Where such superstitions are more than playfully held, they are gross cases of calling that a cause which has no relation to the event.
The key to the whole matter lies in remembering that we are here dealing with feelings, and that feelings are irrational and are the product of personal experience. The experience may be bitter or sweet, and to some degree its effects are modified by education; but in substance your feelings and emotions make you what you are, and your capacities in these directions were born with you. If the citizens of a town have no feeling about political dishonesty, reformers may talk their throats out without producing any result; it is only when taxes get intolerable or the sewers smell to heaven that anything will be done. Many people die for whose deaths each of us ought to feel grief, but if these people have never happened to touch our feelings, we can reason with ourselves in vain that we should feel deeply grieved. Feeling and emotion are the deepest, most primitive part of human nature; and very little of its field has been reduced to the generalizations of reason.
When you come, therefore, in the making of your argument to the point of stirring up the feelings of your readers on the subject do not waste any time in considering what they ought to feel: the only pertinent question is what they do feel. On your shrewdness in estimating what these feelings are, and how strong they are, will hang your success as an advocate. Tact is the faculty you need now—the faculty of judging men, of knowing when they will rise to an appeal, and when they will lie back inert and uninterested. This is a matter you cannot reason about; if you have the faculty it will be borne in on you how other men will feel on your subject. The skill of politicians, where it does not confine itself to estimating how much the people will stand before rebelling, consists in this intuition of the movement of public opinion; and the great leaders are the men who have so sure a sense of these large waves of popular feeling that they can utter at the right moment the word that will gather together this diffused and uncrystallized feeling into a living force.
At the other extreme are the arguments where the appeal to feelings is everything, since it is clear that the audience is already of the speaker’s way of thinking. Examples of such arguments are most apt to be found in speeches in political campaigns and in appeals for money to help forward charities of all kinds. It is probable that most of the conversions in political matters are through reading; consequently the purpose of the speeches is to stir up excitement and feeling to such a heat that the maximum of the party voters will take the trouble to go out to the polls. Arguments directed to this class, accordingly, are almost wholly appeals to feeling.
(Adapted from The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Making of Arguments, by J. H. Gardiner)

THE RULE OF MEN

A mosaic LAW by Frederick Dielman
Source loc.gov
From en.wikipedia.org

There is a common misconception that in a democracy, 51% of the electorate can override the wishes of the other 49%, even ordering genocide by decree if they wanted to. This is not so; it may be true in the idealized dystopic world of some political scientists, but in reality, no democracy is a democracy for very long if it implements a tyranny of the majority.
There is however a worrying tendency amongst many people to assume that all branches of government must always reflect the views of the majority, no matter what, without regard for the ‘rule of law’.
(johnleemk at infernalramblings.com)
The ‘rule of law’ is what governments, judges and the legal profession have been hiding from us for centuries, while they and their cronies feed off of the conflict and human misery created by their illegal acts and divisive political philosophies. Mankind has long had this knowledge to create a better world for all and it is suppressed, for the profit of some. This suppression of truth is the greatest crime against humanity ever committed. It is an unthinkably evil crime. The unbelievable degree of evil and malice against mankind of this crime is the greatest defense of the perpetrators. These groups hypocritically claim to be acting in mankind’s interest. Unchecked, these crimes will drive mankind to extinction by war, civilizations or ecological collapse. Do not expect the legal profession to judge itself guilty in this or any other matter.
(The ‘Rule of Law’ by Bill Ross at strike-the-root.com)
In his book The Morality of Law, American legal scholar Lon Fuller identified eight elements of law which have been recognized as necessary for a society aspiring to institute the rule of law. Fuller stated the following:
1. Laws must exist and those laws should be obeyed by all, including government officials.
2. Laws must be published.
3. Laws must be prospective in nature so that the effect of the law may only take place after the law has been passed. For example, the court cannot convict a person of a crime committed before a criminal statute prohibiting the conduct was passed.
4. Laws should be written with reasonable clarity to avoid unfair enforcement.
5. Law must avoid contradictions.
6. Law must not command the impossible.
7. Law must stay constant through time to allow the formalization of rules; however, law also must allow for timely revision when the underlying social and political circumstances have changed.
8. Official action should be consistent with the declared rule.
(uiowa.edu)
Perhaps the most famous exposition of the concept of ‘rule of law’ was laid down by Albert Venn Dicey in his Law of the Constitution in 1895 :
“When we say that the supremacy or the ‘rule of law’ is a characteristic of the English constitution, we generally include under one expression at least three distinct though kindred conceptions. We mean, in the first place, that no man is punishable or can be made to suffer in body or goods except for a distinct breach of law established in the ordinary legal manner before the ordinary courts of the land. …… Every official, from the Prime Minister down to a constable or a collector of taxes, is under the same responsibility for every act done without legal justification as any other citizen. The Reports abound with cases in which officials have been brought before the courts, and made, in their personal capacity, liable to punishment, or to the payment of damages, for acts done in their official character but in excess of their lawful authority. (Appointed government officials and politicians, alike) … and all subordinates, though carrying out the commands of their official superiors, are as responsible for any act which the law does not authorize as is any private and unofficial person.” — Law of the Constitution (London: MacMillan, 9th ed., 1950), 194.
The ‘rule of law’ requires the government to exercise its power in accordance with well-established and clearly written rules, regulations, and legal principles. A distinction is sometimes drawn between power, will, and force, on the one hand, and law, on the other. When a government official acts pursuant to an express provision of a written law, he acts within the rule of law. But when a government official acts without the imprimatur of any law, he or she does so by the sheer force of personal will and power.
For similar reasons, the ‘rule of law’ is abridged when the government attempts to punish someone for violating a vague or poorly worded law. Ill-defined laws confer too much discretion upon government officials who are charged with the responsibility of prosecuting individuals for criminal wrongdoing. The more prosecutorial decisions are based on the personal discretion of a government official, the less they are based on law.
(legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com)
The Rule of Law involves:
1. The rights of individuals are determined by legal rules and not the arbitrary behavior of authorities.
2. There can be no punishment unless a court decides there has been a breach of law.
3. Everyone, regardless of your position in society, is subject to the law.
4. The critical feature to the ‘rule of law’ is that individual liberties depend on it. Its success depends on the role of trial by jury and the impartiality of judges. It also depends on Prerogative Orders.
There are three Prerogative Orders:
1. Certiorari calls a case up from an inferior court to a superior one to ensure justice is done.
2. Prohibition prevents an inferior court from hearing a case it does not have the power to listen to.
3. Mandamus orders an inferior court to carry out its duties.
(historylearningsite.co.uk)
The ‘rule of law,’ by its very words implies that it is intended to replace or at least control the power of rulers and all of the problems associated with arbitrary rulers and the conflict of competition for the position of ‘ruler.’ It also implies that it is not a mere replacement of rulers by another ruler class called ‘Judge,’ since this is just a name change and solves no problems. If it means that the law is supreme and Judges are mere interpreters, this is just a shifting of arbitrary rule to those who make the laws. Even if the lawmakers are elected representatives of the people, this still does not solve the problem of the majority enslaving the productive, oppressing minorities and collapsing civilization. Therefore, the rule of law cannot be a mere shifting of power to any one group, including the majority, since this solves none of mankind’s organizational problems. The ‘rule of law’ must be something different.
The ‘rule of law’ cannot leave any particular group in charge, since this group would ultimately enslave all others, as proven by historical experience. Since control of the law cannot be entrusted to some, it must be entrusted to all. Therefore, the ‘rule of law’ must be a simple philosophical statement of what are justice and not justice easily understood and agreed to by all men. This allows all to see that the law is fair and ensure that justice is done, to guard against injustice. If all have fairness and justice, no honest man will desire conflict. The ‘rule of law’ must also be the glue that ties all of mankind together in common interest, for mutual survival. Since this is the purpose of ‘the rule of law,’ it must also be a moral statement that mankind’s overall survival is more important than some natural rights of inherently free men. Given that man’s second highest goal is freedom, the ‘rule of law’ must limit freedom as little as possible, sufficient only to reduce conflict. If this were not the case, conflict would occur in pursuit of freedom.
Under the ‘rule of law,’ honest men are in charge, with a simple and precise definition of what they should be doing. Democracy will be prevented from discriminating on any basis, ending divide and conquer politics, forcing voters to consider common interest rather than advantage over others.
The answer to the implied judicial question of ‘I am big, I have all the power and can do whatever I please, you cannot prove me wrong and what can you do about it?’ is, You have just been proven wrong. You are big and will thus fall very hard and take many with you. If you are not forced to fall, you will take all of us with you when your offenses against natural law which is also man’s law collapses the civilization on which you prey.
The entire legal profession is profoundly wrong and an enemy of mankind. Who judges the judges? We do.
(The ‘Rule of Law’ by Bill Ross at strike-the-root.com)
At the end of the day, there are only two options for how men can govern themselves – by laws, or by the will of other men. The ‘rule of law’ represents objective, dispassionate standards that are made known to the public and that are applied and enforced equally to all citizens. The rule of men represents subjective, fleeting standards that are never fully known by any and that are applied purely to satisfy the wishes of a small, concentrated group in power. This small group may indeed be very virtuous and well-meaning, but good intentions are in themselves insufficient. The rule of men will always be ripe for exploitation, whether by the greedy, the evil, or the foolish.
(americansolutions.com)
Despite its ancient history, the ‘rule of law’ is not celebrated in all quarters. The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham described the rule of law as “nonsense on stilts.” The twentieth century has seen its share of political leaders who have oppressed disfavored persons or groups without warning or reason, governing as if no such thing as the ‘rule of law’ existed. For many people around the world, the ‘rule of law’ is essential to freedom.
(answers.com)
The ‘rule of law’ and natural justice require that everyone be subject to the same law, that the law should do justice by not punishing those whose actions are innocent or justified. There must be certainty in the law, so that all can regulate their affairs accordingly. There must be access to independent tribunals and a system of appeals, and a means of preventing arbitrary law-making particularly by officials and inferior courts.
The English Legal System attempts to meet these requirements and is largely successful. There are however, concerns regarding access to justice and the implications of Access to Justice Act 1999. The Community legal Advice ensures legal advice and representation, but legal aid does not cover all types of case, and people with even modest incomes may not be eligible. Darling J is supposed to have said, “The law, like the tavern, is open to all”, but it may be more correct to say, as did Lord Justice Matthew almost a century ago, “In England justice is open to all, like the Ritz”.
(sixthformlaw.info)
In a democracy, the laws created by the institutions are to be enforced and followed, regardless of whether the majority benefits or is harmed by them. In the West, it is not possible for white policemen to gun down suspicious-looking black men on the excuse that these people are probably criminals, or that this coldblooded murder benefits the majority white population.
Similarly, when the courts interpret the law, they are supposed to have only one thing in mind — what the law says. To allow the majority to impose its will on the minority by coercing the courts into following a false interpretation of the law is to throw the door open to anarchy.
The institutions of a country do not exist to provide a semblance of organization to the messy process of enforcing a tyranny of the majority. A civilized country is ruled by what the statute books have to say, not by the whims and fancies of the majority.
In some “democracies”, the branches of government which are directly or indirectly elected by the citizens seem to think they can lord it over the unelected branch, which is usually the judiciary. But all that does is raise the question, what is supreme in a civilized nation? Is it the will of the majority, or the will of the constitution? In some idealized dystopic “democracy”, the will of the majority may be supreme, but in the real world, any self-respecting civilized society knows that it is the law which takes priority.
(johnleemk at infernalramblings.com)

FAST RIDE THROUGH OUR YOUTH

Easy Rider Poster
Internet Movie Poster Awards

Easy Rider shook up the languishing movie industry when it grossed over 19 million dollars in 1969; it captured the spirit of the times as it woke Hollywood up to the power of young audiences and socially relevant movies, along with such other landmarks of the late ’60s as Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and 2001. Shot on location by Laszlo Kovacs, Easy Rider eschewed old-fashioned Hollywood polish for documentary-style immediacy, and it enhanced its casual feel with improvised dialogue and realistically “stoned” acting. With a soundtrack of contemporary rock songs by Jimi Hendrix, the Band, and Steppenwolf to complete the atmosphere, Easy Rider was hailed for capturing the increasingly violent Vietnam-era split between the counterculture and the repressive Establishment. Experiencing the “shock of recognition,” youth audiences embraced Easy Rider’s vision of both the attractions and the limits of dropping out, proving that audience’s box-office power and turning Nicholson into a movie star. The momentarily hip Academy nominated Nicholson for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, and Fonda, Hopper, and Terry Southern for their screenplay. Though none of its imitators would match its impact, Easy Rider remains one of the seminal works of late ’60s Hollywood both for its trailblazing legacy and its sharply perceptive portrait of its chaotic times.
(Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide)
The names of the two main characters, Wyatt and Billy, suggest the two memorable Western outlaws Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid – or ‘Wild Bill’ Hickcock. Rather than traveling westward on horses as the frontiersmen did, the two modern-day cowboys travel eastward from Los Angeles – the end of the traditional frontier – on decorated Harley-Davidson choppers on an epic journey into the unknown for the ‘American dream’.
Easy Rider surprisingly, was an extremely successful, low-budget (under $400,000), counter-cultural, independent film for the alternative youth/cult market – one of the first of its kind that was an enormous financial success. Its story contained sex, drugs, casual violence, a sacrificial tale (with a shocking, unhappy ending), and a pulsating rock and roll soundtrack reinforcing or commenting on the film’s themes.
(American Movie Classics Company LLC)
One morning, two free-wheeling, long-haired, social misfits/dropouts/hippies ride up to La Contenta Bar, south of the border in Mexico. With Jesus (Antonio Mendoza), they walk around the side of the bar through an auto-wrecking dump yard. After Jesus scoops out a small amount of white powder (cocaine) onto a mirror, they both sniff the dope. In Spanish, the thinner, calmer one chuckles: “Si pura vida (Yes, it’s pure life.)” Then, he hands a packet of money to Jesus who thumbs through it and smiles. The two bikers, who have presumably orchestrated the decision to buy the cocaine in Mexico, are given cases of the powder in the drug deal.
Before the film cuts to the next scene, the loud noise of a jet engine plays on the soundtrack. In the next scene of their dope deal, they are now in California where they have smuggled the drugs for sale to a dealer. The two are on an airport road next to the touch down point of jet planes at Los Angeles International Airport – the sound of approaching planes is excruciatingly loud. A Rolls Royce pulls into the frame with their Connection (Phil Spector, the famous rock and roll producer in a cameo role). While testing the white powder in the front seat of their white pickup truck, the Connection ducks every time a plane lands. In exchange for the drugs, the Bodyguard (Mac Mashourian) gives a large quantity of cash to one of the bikers in the front seat of the Rolls.
(American Movie Classics Company LLC)
The drug deal was finalized to the tune of Steppenwolf’s “The Pusher,” a song which is overtly against hard-drug pushers and dealing:

You know I smoked a lot of grass
Oh Lord, I popped a lot of pills
But I’ve never touched nothin’
That my spirit could kill
You know I’ve seen a lot of people walkin’ round
With tombstones in their eyes
But the pusher don’t care
Aw, if you live or if you die
God damn the Pusher
God damn, hey I say the Pusher
I said God damn, God damn the Pusher man.
(American Movie Classics Company LLC)

With the stash of money they’ve made from selling drugs, they have financed their trip, including the purchase of high-handled motorcycles. One of them rolls up the banknotes and stuffs them into a long plastic tube that will be inserted snake-like into the tear-drop shaped gas tank of his stars-and-stripes decorated motorcycle. The two part-time drug dealers are:
• A cool and introspective “Captain America” Wyatt (Peter Fonda) on a gleaming, silver-chromed low-riding bike with a ‘stars-and-stripes’ tear-drop gas tank, wearing a tight leather pants held at the waist by a round belt-buckle and a black leather jacket with an American flag emblazoned on the back; also with a ‘stars-and-stripes’ helmet.
• Mustached and shaggy, long-haired Billy the Kid (Dennis Hopper), with a tan-colored bush hat, fringed buckskin jacket, shades, and an Indian necklace of animals’ teeth.
(American Movie Classics Company LLC)

1969 Harley-Davidson Easy Rider chopper (1993 replica)
The Art of the Motorcycle – Memphis
Bore x stroke 87.1 x 100.6 mm. 1200 cc.
Power: 61 hp @ 6,000 rpm, Top speed: 100 mph (161 kph)
The Otis Chandler Vintage Museum of Transportation and Wildlife
Oxnard, California.
Author Daniel Hartwig from New Haven, CT, USA
From commons.wikimedia.org

Wyatt casts off his wristwatch to the ground, a literal and symbolic flourish that shows his new-found freedom and rejection of time constraints in modern society. As they take to the open road on their motorcycles, cross the Colorado River and pass through unspoiled buttes and sand-colored deserts, the credits begin to scroll, accompanied by the sound of the popular song by Steppenwolf: “Born To Be Wild.” It is the start of a beautiful adventure as they travel through memorable landscapes of America’s natural beauty, accompanied by the pounding of rock music.
(American Movie Classics Company LLC)
Easy Rider explores the societal landscape, issues, and tensions in the United States during the 1960s, such as the rise and fall of the hippie movement, drug use, and communal lifestyle. Easy Rider is legendary for its use of real drugs in its portrayal of marijuana and other substances.
During their trip, Wyatt and Billy met and have a meal with a rancher, whom Wyatt complimented for his ability to provide for his large family. Later, the duo picked up a hitch-hiker (Luke Askew) and agreed to take him to his commune, where they stayed for a day. Life in the commune appeared to be hard, with hippies from the city finding it difficult to grow their own crops. (One of the children seen in the commune was played by Fonda’s four-year-old daughter Bridget).
While jokingly riding along with a parade in a small town, the pair were arrested by the local authorities for “parading without a permit.” In jail, they befriended ACLU lawyer and local drunk George Hanson (Jack Nicholson). George helped them get out of jail, and decided to travel with Wyatt and Billy to New Orleans. As they camp that night, Wyatt and Billy introduced George to marijuana. As an alcoholic and a “square,” George was reluctant to try the marijuana (“It leads to harder stuff”), but he eventually relented.
(From Wikipedia)
While attempting to eat in a small rural Louisiana restaurant, the trio’s appearance attracted the attention of the locals. The girls in the restaurant wanted to meet the men and ride with them, but the local men and police officer make mocking, racist, and homophobic remarks. One of the men menacingly stated, “I don’t believe they’ll make the parish line.” Wyatt, Billy, and George left without eating and made camp outside of town. The events of the day caused George to comment: “This used to be a hell of a good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.” He observed that Americans talk a lot about the value of freedom, but are actually afraid of anyone who truly exhibits it.
In the middle of the night, the local men returned and brutally beat the trio while they were sleeping. Wyatt and Billy suffer minor injuries, but George is killed by a machete strike to the neck. Wyatt and Billy wrapped George up in his sleeping bag, gather his belongings, and vow to return the items to his parents.
They continued riding to New Orleans and found the brothel George had intended to visit. Taking prostitutes Karen (Karen Black) and Mary (Toni Basil) with them, Wyatt and Billy decided to go outside and wandered the parade-filled street of the Mardi Gras celebration. They ended up in a cemetery, where all four ingest LSD. They experienced a psychedelic bad trip, represented through quick edits, sound effects, and over-exposed film.
(From Wikipedia)
Making camp afterward, Wyatt declared: “You know Billy, we blew it.” Wyatt realized that their search for freedom, while financially successful, was a spiritual failure. The next morning, the two were continuing their trip to Florida (where they hope to retire wealthy) when two rednecks in a pickup truck spotted them and decided to “scare the hell out of them” with their shotgun. As they pulled alongside Billy and insulted him, Billy sticked his middle finger up at them dismissively. In response, one of the men fired the shotgun at Billy and seriously wounded him.
(From Wikipedia)
Middle America’s hatred for the long-haired cyclists is shown in the film’s famous ending. When Wyatt speeds down the road to seek help for his dying friend, the rednecks turn around and drive toward him – gunfire again blasts through the window and Wyatt’s bike flies through the air. (Significantly, Wyatt’s dead body doesn’t appear in the final scene). The closing image (of the earlier flash-forward) is an aerial shot floating upwards above his motorcycle which is burning in flames by the side of the road. Death seems to be the only freedom or means to escape from the system in America where alternative lifestyles and idealism are despised as too challenging or free. The romance of the American highway is turned menacing and deadly.
The words of Ballad of Easy Rider (by Roger McGuinn of The Byrds) are heard under the rolling credits. The uneasy aerial camera shot pulls back on the winding river alongside the highway. The river – which extends to the hazy horizon – is the final image of the film before a fade-out to black. The ballad is about a man who only wanted to be free like the flowing river amidst America’s natural landscape:

The river flows, it flows to the sea
Wherever that river goes, that’s where I want to be
Flow river flow, let your waters wash down
Take me from this road to some other town
All I wanted was to be free
And that’s the way it turned out to be…
(American Movie Classics Company LLC)

Easy Rider hit theaters with a memorable tag line: “A man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere.” Star, producer, and co-writer Peter Fonda hated that line, and rightly so. It’s really the story of two men—Wyatt and Billy, played by Fonda and co-writer and director Dennis Hopper—who went looking for America and found it everywhere. They just didn’t find a place for themselves.
(Keith Phipps at slate.com)

 Photos signed by Hopper, Fonda and Nicholson
Images from nwlimited.wordpress.com

Hopper’s film was an appropriate fast ride through our youth. We all wanted to become outlaws, till we saw the final scene – Jeffrey Jolson at Hollywood Today.

Crew:
Director:Dennis Hopper
Author:Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Terry Southern
Producer:Peter Fonda
Director of Photography:László Kovács
Editor:Donn Cambern

Cast:
Peter Fonda … Wyatt
Dennis Hopper … Billy
Antonio Mendoza … Jesus
Phil Spector … Connection
Mac Mashourian … Bodyguard
Warren Finnerty … Rancher
Tita Colorado … Rancher’s Wife
Luke Askew … Stranger on Highway
Luana Anders … Lisa
Sabrina Scharf … Sarah
Robert Walker Jr. … Jack
Sandy Brown Wyeth … Joanne
Robert Ball
Carmen Phillips
Ellie Wood Walker
(American Movie Classics Company LLC)

PAKISTANI POLITICIANS

By Dr Muzaffar Iqbal
Friday, July 08, 2011

Reposted with kind permission of Dr Muzaffar Iqbal

Most Pakistani politicians suffer from verbal diarrhoea: words fall from their mouths without any control. As a result of this widespread disease, one can never believe in what they say. They issue ultimatums and deadlines, they form and break alliances, they accuse each other of various crimes, but one can never know if any of this is true. None of this can be considered politics, no matter how one defines politics. It is, in fact, moral decay which has permeated to such an extent that it has become a norm, an acceptable mode of behaviour which carries no consequences or so they think.
Pakistani politicians have no vision for the country; they are not trained in any school to run a state; they are poorly educated and their corrupt lives have made them walking disasters for the nation. There are a few exceptions to the corrupt herd, but even those do not stand out when it comes to what falls from their mouths. Imran Khan, for instance, has never been blamed for corruption, but all he has to offer to this unfortunate nation is froth and foam. He issues deadlines which mean nothing; he announces long marches which never start; he repeats himself ad nauseam; he has shown no strategic planning. One wonders why he is stuck in a cul-de-sac. Why he shows no leadership for a decisive match? What ails him?
Suppose the general elections are called in the near future. What would be his response to the urgent need of finding candidates who can actually stand out from the herd? Who will be with him? There is hardly any plan visible in his politics; it is an unending array of angry statements. Elections cannot be won by empty rhetoric; thus, one wonders if he has condemned himself to remain a failure.
The next general elections are inevitable; the only question is the date on which they will be held, but there is not a single political party which has started to plan for a corruption-free election which will restore some degree of faith in the choice offered by the ballot box. This includes the so-called most organised political party of Pakistan, the Jamat-e Islami. What prevents them, for instance, to go to the Supreme Court of Pakistan and lodge a reference against the existing voters’ list, which according to Imran Khan contains millions of bogus votes? What are they waiting for?
One cannot hope for any good from the ruling party; its only interest will be to return to power. It has proven its inefficiency, not to talk about corruption. It has been able to defeat the opposition on every single issue so far, but at the expense of the country’s future. The presidency is occupied by a man who is partial, not to mention his other “qualifications”; he is the de facto head of a political party on which he has family monopoly. This is in violation of the constitution, but no politician is able to challenge this effectively. Only once in a while, they are able to foam about it with their mouthfuls. The ruling party has also made a joke of all other demands so far put forward by the opposition; it follows the letter of the judiciary’s decision, but beats them through ill-intent which kills the spirit of the decision and renders it ineffectual.
There is not a ray of hope in Pakistan’s barren political landscape. It is a wasteland, resounding with empty diarrhoeic bombast. What these men and a few women say means absolutely nothing. And the masses know this; they have been cheated so many times that they now have no faith in politicians but since they do not have any choice and they are fond of fun and drama packed with emotions, they continue to play the game. But that game is at the expense of the country.
In the absence of good management and honest leadership, the country is rapidly sliding into an abyss; every single day increases its problems: the entire infra-structure is under tremendous pressure. From hospitals to educational institutions, and from roads to water management, there is no area of national life free from chaos and mismanagement. If nothing changes, the country will implode with this weight.
Change can only come through two means: a military coup and a change through elections; both options appear bleak. For fair elections, a transparent pre-election process needs to be put in place; however there is no indication that this will happen any time soon. Thus, those who are demanding mid-term elections are simply emptying their mouths into a vacuous hole. If they are serious, they must first insist on the establishment of an impartial body which will conduct the next general elections. They must do their homework and examine the voters’ list. They cannot just state a number and claim that so many million bogus voters exist, as Imran Khan did the other day. They must produce dependable and defensible evidence and bring the issue to the judiciary so that a credible process of genuine representation can begin.
Realism dictates that we must come to terms with the fact that Pakistan has no political culture which can produce credible, honest, dependable politicians. Those who now hold political power will never tolerate a genuine political leadership and hence there seems to be no way out of the present bleak scenario. Imran Khan made an exceptional entry into this wasteland, but made nothing out of it. This is a nightmarish scenario for anyone imagining Pakistan’s future. The accumulated weight of a failed political leadership will eventually invite a military dictator who would claim to be the promised messiah, only to deceive and be deceived by his own falseness.

The writer is a freelance columnist. Email: quantumnotes@gmail.com

INCOMPLETE FACTS PAINT THE WRONG PICTURE

When someone fails at something they usually place blame on anything but themselves and if they are successful, they attribute it to themselves before they attribute it to an outside factor.
We have a tendency to use selective perception when we judge others. Selective perception can give us an idea about a person however it does have its inaccuracies. We see what we want to see instead of what really is, when we use selective perception. When meeting a new person we may be drawn to them right away because there were a few things we noticed that we find appealing and maybe even similar to ourselves but just because we see those things does not mean the person is who we made them out to be. Someone looking for a roommate might accept the application of a person who seems to be “on the same page” but after they move in and some time is spent getting to know them, they might find out that their new roommate has a tendency to be messy and lack responsibility.
Everything that we encounter in life is perceived in one way or another. Perceptions even affect our ethical and moral decisions. Perception is a personal thing. What one person perceives may not be what another person perceives. This does and always will have an effect on how decisions, both personal and business, will be made.
(Christina Hernandez at associatedcontent.com)
Each of us sees and interprets situations based on our own traditions, experiences, and salient moral languages. A teacher with one particular kind of history or moral tradition will see, and interpret what she sees, differently from someone with another kind of history. Teacher A may see a student and notice that this student is visibly shaken, upset, and in need of counsel. Indeed, this student has just received upsetting news. Teacher B may see that student and note nothing unusual. Teacher A is sensitive to emotional suffering in a way B is not; B does not perceive as fully or deeply as the first. Yet let us suppose that Teacher B confronts a situation of conflict among a group of students and, through conversation with students and bystanders, quickly detects blatant unfairness in the way some students are being treated. Teacher A might learn of this conflict, talk to the same participants but at another time period or in a different conversational context, and detect none of the unfairness involved. Teacher B may be more sensitive to issues of fairness than the first teacher; however, in addition, each teacher encountered the situation through a different context, a distinct social encounter that framed the events uniquely. This is not to suggest that there are no moral facts in such situations, but that that different facts and interpretations will be used to frame different telling of the situation depending on the persons and contexts involved in the telling. Each of us brings a particular moral tradition, history, and set of social habits that guide how we see and understand moral situations. Each of us experiences moral situations as participants and our sense making and linguistic descriptions are based in this participation. Teacher A and Teacher B live within certain kinds of moral relations, within circles of social meaning in their classrooms, families, school, and their relations with students. Our perception is not merely a psychological process consisting of individual intellectual faculties; its particulars are shaped by our experiences within ongoing, lived situations with other participants.
(Moral perception through aesthetics: engaging imaginations in educational ethics Journal of Teacher Education, by Abowitz, Kathleen Knight, September 1, 2007 at highbeam.com)
People focus on notable differences, excluding those that are less conspicuous, when making predictions about happiness or convenience. For example, when people were asked how much happier they believe Californians are compared to Midwesterners, Californians and Midwesterners both said Californians must be considerably happier, when, in fact, there was no difference between the actual happiness rating of Californians and Midwesterners. The bias lies in that most people asked focused on and overweighed the sunny weather and ostensible easy-going lifestyle of California and devalued and underrated other aspects of life and determinants of happiness, such as low crime rates and safety from natural disasters like earthquakes (both of which large parts of California lack).
The bandwagon effect is well-documented in behavioral science and has many applications. The general rule is that conduct or beliefs spread among people, as fads and trends clearly do, with “the probability of any individual adopting it increasing with the proportion that have already done so”. As more people come to believe in something, others also “hop on the bandwagon” regardless of the underlying evidence. The tendency to follow the actions or beliefs of others can occur because individuals directly prefer to conform, or because individuals derive information from others. Both explanations have been used for evidence of conformity in psychological experiments.
The bias blind spot is the cognitive bias of failing to compensate for one’s own cognitive biases. According to the better-than-average bias, specifically, people are likely to see themselves as inaccurately “better than average” for possible positive traits and “less than average” for negative traits. When subsequently asked how biased they themselves were, subjects rated themselves as being much less subject to the biases described than the average person.
People have, through their lifetimes, built series of mental emotional filters. They use these filters to make sense of the world. The choices they then make are influenced by their frame or emotional filters.
People with strong biases toward an issue (partisans) perceive media coverage as biased against their opinions, regardless of the reality. Proponents of the hostile media effect argue that this finding cannot be attributed to the presence of bias in the news reports, since partisans from opposing sides of an issue rate the same coverage as biased against their side and biased in favor of the opposing side.
The illusion of control is the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events, for instance to feel that they control outcomes that they demonstrably have no influence over. The effect was named by psychologist Ellen Langer and has been replicated in many different contexts. It is thought to influence gambling behavior and belief in the paranormal. Along with illusory superiority and optimism bias, the illusion of control is one of the positive illusions. The illusion arises because people lack direct introspective insight into whether they are in control of events. Instead they judge their degree of control by a process that is often unreliable. As a result, they see themselves as responsible for events when there is little or no causal link.
The exposure effect (also known as the mere exposure effect) is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. In social psychology, this effect is sometimes called the familiarity principle. In studies of interpersonal attraction, the more often a person is seen by someone, the more pleasing and likeable that person appears to be.
An individual’s track record as a good egalitarian individual can establish an unconscious ethical certification, endorsement, or license within that individual and this will increase their likelihood of making less egalitarian decisions later. This moral credentialing effect occurs even when the individual’s audience is unaware of the individual’s previously established moral credential. For example, individuals who had the opportunity to recruit a woman or African American in one setting were more likely to say later, in a different setting, that a job would be better suited for a man or a Caucasian (Monin & Miller, 2001).
Negativity bias is the name for a psychological phenomenon by which humans pay more attention to and give more weight to negative rather than positive experiences or other kinds of information. This shows up in a number of domains, including:
• When given a piece of positive information and a piece of negative information about a stranger, people’s judgment of the stranger will be negative, rather than neutral (assuming the two pieces of information are not severely imbalanced).
• If a person has a good experience and a bad experience close together, they will feel worse than neutral. This is true even if they would independently judge the two experiences to be of similar magnitude.
• Negative information in the simple form of negation has greater impact and creates more attention than similar positive information in the form of affirmation. For example, describing a behavior in an affirmation elicits less attention and cognitive processing than describing the same behavior using a negation. This is related to information processing on negation in cognitive psychology.
• When put in an environment with a variety of information to pay attention to, people will immediately notice the threats instead of the opportunities or the signals of safety.
The normalcy bias refers to a mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of the government to include the populace in its disaster preparations. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred that it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before.
Post-purchase rationalization is a phenomenon whereby someone who purchases an expensive product or service overlooks any faults or defects in order to justify their purchase. Expensive purchases often involve a lot of careful research and deliberation, and many consumers will often refuse to admit that their decision was made in poor judgment. Many purchasing decisions are made emotionally, based on factors such as brand-loyalty and advertising, and so are often rationalized retrospectively in an attempt to justify the choice. For example, a consumer cannot decide between two popular games consoles, X and Y, but in the end decides to purchase product X on the basis that many of their peers also own this console. After purchasing it, they find that many of their favourite games are only available on product Y. However, they do not wish to feel they made the wrong decision, and so will convince themselves, and their peers, that product X is better than product Y, using arguments such as “I didn’t want to play those games anyway”.
Reactance is an emotional reaction in direct contradiction to rules or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms. Reactance can occur when someone is heavily pressured to accept a certain view or attitude. Reactance can cause the person to adopt or strengthen a view or attitude that is contrary to what was intended, and also increases resistance to persuasion. People using reverse psychology are playing on at least an informal awareness of reactance, attempting to influence someone to choose the opposite of what they request.
Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence, rationality or reality. Studies have consistently shown that holding all else equal; subjects will predict positive outcomes to be more likely than negative outcomes. In addition to being a cognitive bias and a poor way of making decisions, wishful thinking is commonly held to be a specific logical fallacy in an argument when it is assumed that because we wish something to be true or false that it is actually true or false. This fallacy has the form “I wish that P is true/false, therefore P is true/false.” Wishful thinking, if this were true, would underlie appeals to emotion, and would also be a red herring. A believer in UFOs may accept that most UFO photos are faked, but claim that the ones that haven’t been debunked must be considered genuine.
There is a tendency for people to assume that their own opinions, beliefs, preferences, values and habits are ‘normal’ and that others also think the same way that they do. This cognitive bias tends to lead to the perception of a consensus that does not exist, a ‘false consensus’. The false consensus effect is caused by a tendency for people to project their way of thinking onto other people. The fallacy involves a group or individual assuming that their own opinions, beliefs and predilections are more prevalent amongst the public than they really are. The false consensus effect is not necessarily restricted to cases where people believe that their values are shared by the majority. The false consensus effect is also evidenced when people overestimate the extent of their particular belief is correlated with the belief of others. Thus, fundamentalists do not necessarily believe that most people share their views, but their estimates of the number of fundamentalists or people who share their point of view will tend to exceed the number that actually exists. One thinks the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population. Since the members of a group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it, they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way. As an extension, when confronted with evidence that a consensus does not exist, people often assume that the others who do not agree with them are defective in some way.
A self-serving bias occurs when people attribute their successes to internal or personal factors but attribute their failures to situational factors beyond their control. The self-serving bias can be seen in the common human tendency to take credit for success but to deny responsibility for failure It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way that is beneficial to their interests. Self-serving bias may be associated with the better-than-average effect, in which individuals are biased to believe that they typically perform better than the average person in areas important to their self-esteem. This effect, also called “illusory superiority”, has been found when people rate their own driving skill, social sensitivity, leadership ability and many other attributes.
The term “self-serving bias” is most often used to describe a pattern of biased causal inference, in which praise or blame depend on whether success or failure was achieved. For example, a student who gets a good grade on an exam might say, “I got an A because I am intelligent and I studied hard!” whereas a student who does poorly on an exam might say, “The teacher gave me an F because he does not like me!” When someone strategically strives to facilitate external causes for their poor performance (so that they will subsequently have a means to avoid blaming themselves for failure), it may be labeled self-handicapping.
People not only want to hold favorable attitudes about themselves (ego-justification) and their own groups (group-justification), but they also want to hold favorable attitudes about the overarching social order (system-justification). A consequence of this tendency is that existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives to the status quo are disparaged.
(en.wikipedia.org)

THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER

THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER First Edition
Source arundelbookstores
From Wikipedia

Carson McCullers
From t-squat.com

Marilyn Monroe, Carson McCullers and Karen Blixen
From startnarrativehere.com

Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe, Carson McCullers and Karen Blixen
McCullers’ home in Nyack, January 1959
From clusterflock.org

Carson McCullers (1917-1967) was the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Clock without Hands. Born in Columbus, Georgia, on February 19, 1917, she became a promising pianist and enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York when she was seventeen, but lacking money for tuition, she never attended classes. Instead she studied writing at Columbia University, which ultimately led to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the novel that made her an overnight literary sensation. On September 29, 1967, at age fifty, she died in Nyack, New York, where she is buried.
(INDIEBOUND)
In 1938 Carson McCullers, a twenty-one-year-old writing student living in New York, submitted an outline and six chapters of a novel, “The Mute,” to Houghton Mifflin. It was read by several editors there, all of whom agreed that she was a writer of exceptional promise. “I think the author . . . will produce a book of literary distinction. It will be a spellbinder . . . No doubt here is genuine young talent, modern talent.” Houghton Mifflin’s editor in chief, Paul Brooks, and the trade director, Ferris Greenslet, offered her a book contract with an advance of five hundred dollars. McCullers completed the novel the following year and, at the welcome suggestion of Houghton Mifflin, retitled it The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, a phrase taken from the poem “The Lonely Hunter” by Fiona Macleod, the pseudonym of William Sharp. In a letter to McCullers’s agent, Maxim Lieber, dated November 16, 1939, Brooks accepted the final draft of the novel for publication and said, “It is a book which we should be proud to have on our list. We feel that the final revisions have been very successful, and we should expect to get good reviews from the more discerning critics.” The novel was published on June 4, 1940, to extraordinary acclaim, and McCullers, hailed as a child prodigy, became a literary phenomenon.
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Four lonely individuals, marginalized misfits in their families/communities, each obsessed with a vision of his or her place in the world, collect about a single deaf-mute with whom they share their deepest secrets. An adolescent who desires to write symphonies, an itinerant drunk who believes he must organize poor laborers, a black physician whose desire is to motivate his people to demand their rightful place in American society, and a cafe owner whose secret wish is sexually ambiguous, believes that the deaf Mr. Singer understands and validates his or her obsession. Singer, ironically obsessed with a friendship of questionable reciprocity, commits suicide when the friend dies.
This richly detailed work, set in the pre-World War II era in a small southern U.S. city, explores a wide range of contemporaneous issues: the status of the black in the south; the loss of purpose among young people; the continued exploitation of labor. It also deals with disenfranchisement of the physically and/or emotionally disabled and those racial “others.” The social and economic position of the black physician reminds the reader how recently non-caucasian, non-male doctors entered the profession in any numbers, and how far the “others” must go to gain equal status. And, finally, the novel raises questions about suicide and about the parameters of madness.
(McCullers, Carson, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, New York University)
Carson McCullers plots The Heart is a Lonely Hunter around characters. it is a very tightly structured plot on that basis. She deals with each character in turn in each of the three sections of the novel. The novel covers the span of a little over one year. In that year, Singer loses his great love to an insane asylum and gains four more people in his life. The three sections of the novel cover different parts of the year, but do little more than divide the rising, climax, and falling action of the plot. Yet, this is not a novel of that traditional variety. Since the action of the novel is more interior than exterior, it plots the events in the emotional lives of its characters rather than the events in the fictional world at large.
((PinkMonkey)
LIST OF CHARACTERS:
Major Characters:
John Singer – mute man who becomes a repository of the desire of several characters. He loves Spiros Antonapoulos more than anyone else, but is separated from him because of Spiros’ mental illness. When Spiros dies, John Singer kills himself.
Mick Kelly – a girl in her teens who wants to become a musician but who has no resources for that pursuit. She spends her time trying to compose music without knowing how to write it and to play music without any instruments. She finds in John Singer the all-knowing listener she longs for.
Bartholomew “Biff” Brannon – owner of the New York Cafe in the small Southern town of the novel’s setting. He is the spectator of the novel, watching as other characters develop a strong attachment to John Singer. He develops a crush on the young girl, but never acts on it.
Jake Blount – Biff Brannon thinks of him as “the sort of fellow that kids laughed at and dogs wanted to bite.” He is a self-taught Marxist who uses the methods of revival tent meetings to sell the word of Marx. He is only calm when he is with Singer.
Doctor Benedict Mady Copeland – an African-American doctor who is educated in the philosophy of social sciences. He combines a knowledge of Marxism with a knowledge of the history of the oppression of African Americans. He wants to find fellow African Americans who will help him organize his people to fight oppression, but never finds anyone. He also finds John Singer to be the all-knowing and all-understanding listener he has always longed for.
(PinkMonkey)
Richard Wright wrote, “Miss McCullers’ picture of loneliness, death, accident, insanity, fear, mob violence and terror is perhaps the most desolate that has so far come from the South. Her quality of despair is unique and individual; and it seems to me more natural and authentic than that of Faulkner. Her groping characters live in a world more completely lost than any Sherwood Anderson ever dreamed of. And she recounts incidents of death and attitudes of stoicism in sentences whose neutrality makes Hemingway’s terse prose seem warm and partisan by comparison. Hovering mockingly over her story of loneliness in a small town are primitive religion, adolescent hope, the silence of deaf mutes – and all of these give the violent colors of the life she depicts sheen of weird tenderness.
It is impossible to read the book and not wonder about the person who wrote it, the literary antecedents of her style and the origins of such a confounding vision of life. The jacket of the book tells us with great reserve that she is twenty-two years old. Because the novel treats of life in the South, we assume that she is Southern born and reared.”
(“Inner Landscape” New Republic, 103 (Aug, 1940) at carson-mccullers.com)
With the publication of her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters’ inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers’ finest work, an enduring masterpiece. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. Each one yearns for escape from small town life. When Singer’s mute companion goes insane, Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, the book’s heroine (and loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music. Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated — and, through Mick Kelly, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty. Richard Wright praised Carson McCullers for her ability “to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness.” She writes “with a sweep and certainty that are overwhelming,” said the The New York Times. McCullers became an overnight literary sensation, but her novel has endured, just as timely and powerful today as when it was first published.
(Reading Group Guiders)
Critics called the young writer a real find whose novel revealed a new tone, a true writer’s sensibility. The New York Times called it, “a remarkable book…..  (McCullers) writes with a sweep and certainty that are overwhelming.” Richard Wright, in the New Republic, said, “To me the most impressive aspect of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.” And the Saturday Review of Literature commented, “This is an extraordinary novel to have been written by a young woman; but the more important fact is that it is an extraordinary novel in its own right, considerations of authorship apart.” In the Boston Evening Transcript, May Sarton observed, “We have waited a long time for a new writer, and now one has appeared it is an occasion for hosannahs . . . It is hard to think that we shall have to wait a year or two before we can expect another book from this extraordinary young woman.”
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was translated into some fifteen languages, and in 1968 was made into a major motion picture starring Alan Arkin and Sondra Locke, both of whom were nominated for Oscars. The Modern Library named the book one of the top one hundred works of fiction of the twentieth century. Houghton Mifflin remained Carson McCullers’s publisher throughout her career, during which she produced five novels, two plays, twenty short stories, two dozen nonfiction pieces, a book of children’s verse, and a handful of distinguished poems. She worked with a select few editors over the years, but she enjoyed a unique kinship with Robert Linscott, who had been one of the first fans of her work. She met him in New York in the summer of 1941, and later she would visit him and his family in Boston. There is a long history of mutual admiration between Houghton and McCullers. In a letter to Ferris Greenslet, dated November 14, 1941, McCullers wrote, “Houghton Mifflin has treated me so handsomely, and believe me, I appreciate it . . . Later on, I wish H.M. would let or make Bob (Linscott) come down for a visit here. We have such good music.” In 1941 Greenslet sponsored McCullers for a Guggenheim fellowship, which enabled her to travel to Europe in 1942. In a December 23, 1941, letter to McCullers, Linscott wrote, “All your friends in New York are so concerned for you. Really, Carson, you do float in a sea of love. I’ve never seen such devotion.”
After her death in 1967, Houghton Mifflin published one last volume of previously uncollected writings, The Mortgaged Heart, edited by Carson’s sister Rita. Today, as always, Carson McCullers remains an integral part of Houghton’s longstanding commitment to — and legacy of — discovering new writers and supporting and nurturing them throughout their careers.
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
“It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses…… I understand only particles. I understand the characters, but the novel itself is not in focus. The focus comes at random moments which no one can understand, least of all the author. For me, they usually follow great effort. To me, these illuminations are the grace of labor. All of my work has happened this way. It is at once the hazard and the beauty that a writer has to depend on these illuminations. After months of confusion and labor, when the idea has flowered, the collusion is Divine.” – Carson McCullers

HUMAN TRAITS AND THEIR SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE

In walking down a street with a friend, for example, one may be attracted by the array of bright colors, of flowers, jewelry and clothing in the shop windows, blink one’s eyes in the glare of the sun, feel a satisfaction in the presence of other people and a loneliness for a particular friend, dodge before a passing automobile, be envious of its occupant, and smile benevolently at a passing child.
The human being, born into a world where there are many things to be learned both of natural law and human relations, is, as it were, fortunately born ignorant. He has instincts which are pliable enough to be modified into habits, and in consequence socially useful habits can be deliberately inculcated in the immature members of a society by their elders.
The whole process of education is a utilization of man’s prolonged period of infancy, for the deliberate acquisition of habits. This is all the more important since only by such habit formation during the long period of human infancy can the achievements of civilization be handed down from generation to generation. Art, science, industrial methods, social customs, these are not inherited by the individual as are the instincts of sex, pugnacity, etc.
Man’s “innate tendency to fool” is notorious, a tendency particularly noticeable in children. Objects are responded to, not as means to ends, not with reference to their use, but simply for the sheer satisfaction of manipulation. Facial expressions, sounds, gestures, are made almost on any provocation; they are the expressions of an abundant “physiological uneasiness.” The two-year-old is a mechanism that simply must and will move about, make all kinds of superfluous gestures and facial expressions, and random sounds, as it were, just to get rid of its stored-up energy.
An important part of man’s social equipment is his susceptibility to the praise and blame of his fellows. That is, among the things which instinctively satisfy men are objective marks of praise or approval on the part of other people; among the things which annoy them, sometimes to the point of acute distress, are marks of disapproval, scorn, or blame. This is illustrated most simply and directly in the satisfaction felt at “intimate approval as by smiles, pats,” kindly words, or epithets applied by other people to one’s own actions or ideas, and the discomfort, amounting sometimes to pain, that is felt at frowns, hoots, sneers, and epithets of scorn or derision.
An individual, to a certain extent, makes his own environment. What kind of an environment he will make depends on the kinds of capacities and interests he has to start with. Similarity of original tendencies and interests brings men together as differences among these keep them apart. The libraries, the theaters, and the baseball parks are all equally possible and accessible features of their environment to individuals of a given economic or social class. Yet a hundred individuals with the same education and social opportunities will make themselves by choice a hundred different environments. They will select, even from the same physical environment, different aspects. The Grand Canyon is a different environment to the artist and to the geologist; a crowd of people at an amusement park constitutes a different environment to the man who has come out to make psychological observations, and the man who has come out for a day’s fun. A dozen men, teachers and students, selected at random on a university campus, might well be expected to note largely different though overlapping facts, as the most significant features of the life of the university.
The environment is the less important in the moulding of character, the less fixed and unavoidable it becomes. If an individual has the chance to change his environment to suit his own original demands and interests, these are the less likely to undergo modification. This is illustrated in the animal world by the migratory birds, which change their habitations with the seasons. Similarly human beings, to suit the original mental traits with which they are endowed, can and do exchange one environment for another. There are a very large number of individuals living in New York City, in the twentieth century, for example, for whom a multiplicity of environments are possible. The one that becomes habitual with an individual is a matter of his own free choice.
Original nature thus sets the scope and the limits of an individual’s character and achievement. It tells “how much” and, in the most general way, “what” his capacities are. Thus a man born with a normal vocal apparatus can speak; a man born with normal vision can see. But what language he shall speak, and what sights he shall see, depends on the social and geographical situation in which he happens to be placed. Again, if a man is born with a “high general intelligence,” that is, with keen sensory discriminations and motor responses, precise and accurate powers of analysis of judgment, a capacity for the quick and effective acquisition and modification of habits, we can safely predict that he will excel in some direction. But whether he will stand out as a lawyer, doctor, philosopher, poet, or executive, it is almost impossible from original nature to tell.
To the very young the world seems an unprecedented novelty. It seems scarcely older than their own memories, which are few and short, and their own experience, which is necessarily limited and confined. Through education our experience becomes immeasurably widened; we can vicariously live through the experiences of other people through hearing or reading, and can acquire the racial memory which goes back as far as the records of history, or anthropological research. As we grow older we come to learn that our civilization has a history; that our present has a past.
We inherit the past in a more vital sense. We inherit ways of thought and action, social systems, scientific and industrial methods, manners and morals, educational bequests and ideals, all that we have and are. Without these, each generation would have to start anew. If the whole of existing society were destroyed, and a newborn generation could be miraculously preserved to maturity, its members would have to start on the same level, with the same ignorance, uncertainties, and impotence as primitive savages.
We are thus to a very large extent conditioned by the past. It is as if we had inherited a fortune composed of various kinds of properties, houses, books, automobiles, warehouses, musical instruments, and in addition, trade concessions, business secrets, formulas, methods, and good-will. Our activities will be limited in measure by the extent of the property, its constituent items, and the repair in which we keep it.
Everyone has felt more or less keenly this sense of being a link in a great tradition, whether of a college, family, or country. Sometimes this sense for tradition takes an esthetic form, as in the case of ritual, whether social or religious. Old streets, ivied towers, ancient rooms, become symbols of great and dignified achievements; ceremonies come to be invested with a serious beauty and memorable charm. They become reminders of a “torch to be carried on,” of a spirit to be cherished and kept alive, of a history to be carried on or a purpose or an ideal to be fulfilled. This sense for the past, which, as Santayana says, makes a man loyal to the sources of his being, have both its virtues and vices. It is of immense value in preserving continuity and cultural integration, in keeping many men continuously moving toward a single fixed end. It may also wrap dangerously irrelevant habits and institutions in a saving—and illusive—halo.
There are, on the other hand, individuals with very little sense for tradition. This may be accounted for in some cases by a marked esthetic insensibility, which sees in ritual, ceremony, or habit, merely the literal, without any appreciation at all of its symbolic significance. In other cases, individuals are unsusceptible and hostile to tradition, because they have themselves been socially disinherited. This is illustrated not infrequently in the case of foreigners who, for one reason or another, have left and lost interest in their native land, and become men without a country.
The extreme form of uncritical veneration of the past may be said to take the position that old things are good simply because they are old; new things are evil simply because they are new. Institutions, Ideas, Customs are, like wines, supposed to attain quality with age. A custom, a law, a code of morals is defined or maintained on the ground of its ancient—and honorable—history, of the great span of years during which it has been current, of the generation after generation that has lived under its auspices. The ways of our fathers, the old time-tested ways, these, we are told, must be our ways. That there are no imperfections, in manners, politics, or morals, in our present social order, that there are no improvements which good-will, energy, and intelligence can effect, few will maintain without qualification. To do so implies, when sincere, extraordinary blindness to the facts, for example, of poverty and disease, which, though they do not happen to touch a particular individual, are patent and ubiquitous enough.
In civilized life, also, the greater part of human energy must be spent in necessary or instrumental business. Men must, as always, be fed, clothed, and housed, and the fulfillment of these primary human demands absorbs the greater part of the waking hours of the majority of mankind. Our civilization is predominantly industrial; it is devoted almost entirely to the transforming of the world of nature into products for the gratification of the physical wants of men. These wants have, of course, become much complicated and refined: men wish not only to live, but to live commodiously and well. They want not merely a roof over their heads, but a pleasant and comfortable house in which to live. They want not merely something to stave off starvation, but palatable foods. In the satisfaction of these increasingly complicated demands a great diversity of industries arises. With every new want to be fulfilled, there is a new occupation, pursued not for its own sake, but for the sake of the good which it produces.
(Adapted from the Project Gutenberg EBook of Human Traits and their Social Significance, by Irwin Edman, PhD, Instructor in Philosophy, Columbia University)

THE ARMED FORCES OFFICER

Photo: AFP/GETTY IMAGES

In the beginning, a man takes an oath to uphold his country’s Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, to bear true faith and allegiance, and to discharge well and faithfully the duties of office. He does this without any mental reservation.
There persists in many military officers a defensive attitude toward their own profession which has no practical relation to the strength of the ground on which they are enabled to stand. Toward any unfair and flippant criticism of the “military mind” they react with resentment, instead of with buoyant proof that their own minds are more plastic and more receptive to national ideals than those of any other profession.
When someone arises within the halls of government to say that the military establishment is “uneconomic” because it cuts no bricks, bales no hay and produces nothing which can be vended in the market places, it is not unusual to hear some military men concur in this strange notion. That acquiescence is wholly unbecoming.
The physician is not slurred as belonging to a nonproductive profession because he contributes only to the care and healing of the body, and through these things to the general well-being of society.
The military way is a long, hard road, and it makes extraordinary requirements of every individual. In war, particularly, it puts stresses upon men such as they have not known elsewhere, and the temptation to “get out from under” would be irresistible if their spirits had not been tempered to the ordeal. If nothing but fear of punishments were depended upon to hold men to the line during extreme trial, the result would be wholesale mutiny and a situation altogether beyond the control of leadership. So it must be true that it is out of the impact of ideals mainly that men develop the strength to face situations from which it would be normal to run away.
During the normal routine of peace, members of the Armed Services are expected to respond to situations that are more extensive, more complex, and take longer to reach fulfillment than the situations to which the majority of men instinctively respond. Even the length of the enlistment period looks like a slow march up a 60-mile grade. Promotion is slow, duty frequently monotonous. It is all too easy for the individual to worry about his own insignificance and to feel that he has become lost in the crowd. Under these conditions a man may go altogether bad, or simply get lazy and rock with the grain.
Precision in personal habits, precision in drill and precision in daily living are the high road to that kind of discipline which best insures cool and collected thought and unity of action on the field of battle. When men, working together, successfully attain to a high standard of orderliness, deportment and response, each to the other, they develop the cohesive strength which will carry them through any great crisis. For this reason mainly, military life is far more exacting than civil life.
Mutual respect and courtesy are indispensable elements in military organization. The junior shows deference to the senior; the senior shows consideration for him. The salute is the ancient and universal privilege of fighting men. It is a recognition of a common fellowship in a proud profession. Saluting is an expression of courtesy, alertness, and discipline. The senior is as obliged to return it as the junior is to initiate it. In fact, in the Army particularly, it is not unusual to see the senior salute first.
The military society is a little more tightly closed than a civilian society, particularly in posts, camps and stations. For that reason the pressure from the distaff side is usually a little heavier. Wives get together more frequently, know one another better, and take a more direct interest in their husbands’ careers than is common elsewhere.
In the study of getting along with people, we could not do better than quote what was published some time ago in the United States Coast Guard Magazine. Under the title “Thirteen Mistakes,” the coast guardsmen raised their warning flares above the 13 pitfalls. It is a mistake:
1. To attempt to set up your own standard of right and wrong.
2. To try to measure the enjoyment of others by your own.
3. To expect uniformity of opinions in the world.
4. To fail to make allowance for inexperience.
5. To endeavor to mold all dispositions alike.
6. Not to yield on unimportant trifles.
7. To look for perfection in our own actions.
8. To worry ourselves and others about what can’t be remedied.
9. Not to help everybody wherever, however, whenever we can.
10. To consider impossible what we cannot ourselves perform.
11. To believe only what our finite minds can grasp.
12. Not to make allowances for the weakness of others.
13. To estimate by some outside quality, when it is that within which makes the man.
The military officer is expected to be the embodiment of character, given to forthright but amiable speech, capable of expressing his ideas and purpose clearly, careful of customs and good usage, and carrying himself with poise and assurance. For if he does not have the aura of vitality, confidence and reflection which is expected in a leader of men, it will be suspected that he is incapable of playing the part however unfairly discriminating that judgment may seem to be, in comparison with the attitude toward other professions.
The officer corps does have its share of “characters.” Some are men born in an uncommon mold, with a great deal of natural phlegm in their systems, a gift for salty speech and a tendency to draw their words as if their thoughts were being raised from a deep well.
In the services, as in any situation in life in which deference to higher opinion is compelled by the nature of an undertaking, the young will do well to consider the wisdom of the precept, “Be patient with your betters.” It is lamentably bad judgment to act by any other rules. Where differences of opinion exist, time and forbearance not infrequently will work the desired change, where stubbornness or rudeness would utterly fail. More than that, a junior owes this much consideration to any senior whose heart is in the right place. It is bad manners, but even worse from the standpoint of tactics, to attempt publicly to score a victory over a senior in any dispute, or to attempt by wit to gain the upper hand of him in the presence of others. Though the point may be gained for the moment, it is usually at the cost of one’s personal hold on the confidence of the senior.
But there is also the other side of the case that the superior should deal considerately with any earnest proposal from his subordinate, rather than dashing cold water in his face, just because he has not thought his proposition through. One of the best-loved editors of the United States, Grove Patterson, of Toledo, Ohio, was remembered by every young journalist who ever came under him because of the care with which he supported every man’s pride. A youngster would go in to him, filled with enthusiasm for some idea, which he himself had not bothered to view in the round. Patterson would listen carefully, and would then say: “That’s a corking idea. Take it and work it out carefully, going over every aspect of it. Then bring it back to me.” On second thought, the youngster would begin having his own doubts, and would shortly begin hoping that the chief would forget all about the subject, which he invariably did. Many celebrated commanders in our military services have won the lasting affection of their subordinates by employing exactly this method.
Men like the direct glance. They feel flattered by it, particularly when they are talking, and in conversation they like to be heard through, not interrupted in mid-passage. That is true whatever their station. Nobody likes to be bored, but fully half of boredom comes from lack of the habit of careful listening. The man who will not listen ever develops wits enough to distinguish between a bore and a sage and therefore cannot pick the best company. The vacant stare, the drifting of eyes from the speaker to a window, or a picture or a passing blonde, though greatly tempting in the midst of long discourse, are taken only as signs of inattention. Many a young officer called to the carpet for some trivial business has managed to square himself with his commander just by looking straight and talking straight in the few moments that decided his future.
Carefulness in the little things counts much. Men develop an aversion to the individual, who cannot remember their names, their titles or their stations, but they will warm to the person who remembers, and they will overlook most of his other shortcomings. Likewise, they are won by any words of appreciation or of interest in what they are doing. Gets a man talking about his business, his golf game or his family, and you are on the inside track toward his friendship. As for senior commanders, when the hours comes for them to bat the ball back and forth in friendly conversation, there is nothing they enjoy more than reminiscing about experiences on the battlefield. Other than inveterate surgical patients, no one can outdo them in talking about their operations.
One of the greatest generals in American history, celebrated for his fighting hardly more than for his tippling, would walk from the room if any man tried to tell an off-color story in his presence. One of the most celebrated and successful Admirals endeared himself to millions of men in all ranks and services by his trick of gathering his chief subordinates together just prior to battle, issuing his orders sternly and surely, and then relaxing long enough to tell them his latest parlor story, knowing that finally it would trickle down through the whole command.
Among the warriors in this gallery are men who would bet a month’s pay on a horse race. There are duelists and brawlers, athletes and aesthetes, men who lived almost sainted lives and scholars who lived more for learning than for fame. Some tended to be so over-reclusive that they almost missed recognition; others were hail-fellow-well-met in any company. Their methods of work reflected these extreme variations in personal type, as did the means they used to draw other men to them, thereby setting a foundation for real success.
There is not one perfect life in the gallery of the great. All were molded by the human influences which surrounded them. They reacted in their own feelings, and toward other men, according as their personal fortunes rose and fell. They sought help where it could be found. When disappointed, they chilled like anyone else. But along with their professional talents, they possessed, in common, a desire for substantial recognition, accompanied by the will to earn it fairly, or else the nation would never have heard their names.
The same thing would no doubt hold true of a majority of the better men who commanded ships, squadrons, regiments, and companies under these commanders, and at their own level were as superior in leadership as the relatively few who rose to national stature because of the achievements of the general body.
While there are no perfect men, there are those who become relatively perfect leaders of men because something in their makeup brings out in strength the highest virtues of all who follow them. That is the way of human nature. Minor shortcomings do not impair the working loyalty, or growth, of the follower who has found someone whose strengths he deems worth emulating. On the other hand, to recognize merit, you must yourself have it. The act of recognizing the worthwhile traits in another person is both the test and the making of character. The man who scorns all others, and thinks no one else worth following, parades his own inferiority before the world. He puts his own character into bankruptcy.
There have been great and distinguished leaders in the military services at all levels, who had no particular gifts for administration, and little for organizing the detail of decisive action either within battle or without. They excelled because of a superior ability to utilize the brains and command the loyalty of well-chosen subordinates. Their particular function was to judge the mark according to their resources and audacity, and then to hold the team steady until the mark was gained.
All military achievement develops out of unity of action. The laurel goes to the man whose powers can most surely be directed toward the end purposes of organization. The winning of battles is the product of the winning of men. That aptitude is not an endowment of formal education, though the man who has led a football team, a class, a fraternity or a debating society is the stronger for the experience which he has gained. It is not uncustomary in those who have excelled in scholarship to despise those who have excelled merely in sympathetic understanding of the human race. But in the military services, though there are niches for the pedant, character is at all times at least as vital as intellect, and the main rewards go to him who can make other men feel toughened as well as elevated.
It is remarked that the man who wishes to hold the respect of others will mention himself not more frequently than a born aristocrat mentions his ancestor. It would be better to dwell upon the importance of being natural, which means neither concealing nor making a vulgar display of one’s ideals and motives, but acting directly according to their dictations.
Coupled with self-control, recollection and thoughtfulness will carry a man far. Men will warm toward a leader when they come to believe that all the energy he stores up by living somewhat within himself is at their service. But when they feel that this is not the case and that his reserve is simply the outward sign of a spiritual miserliness and concentration on purely personal goals, no amount of restraint will ever win their favor. This is as true of him who commands a whole service as of the leader of a picket squad.
No normal young man is likely to recognize in himself the qualities which will persuade others to follow him. On the other hand, any man who can carry out orders in a cheerful spirit, complete this work step by step, use imagination in improving it, and then when the job is done, can face toward his next duty with anticipation, need have no reason to doubt his own capacity for leadership. The psychologists assure us that there is a sound scientific basis for what enlightened military trainers have long held to be true—that the first-class follower and the leader are one and the same. They say that this is literally true, and that their tests prove it so.
But it does not follow that every man can be taught to lead. In the majority of men, success or failure is caused more by mental attitude than by mental capacity. Many are unwilling to face the ordeal of thinking for themselves and of accepting responsibility for others. But the man determined to excel at his own work has already climbed the first rung of the ladder; in that process he perforce learns to think for himself while setting an example to those who are around him.
Said one great political leader: “There is no more valuable subordinate than the man to whom you can give a piece of work and then forget it, in the confident expectation that the next time it is brought to your attention it will come in the form of a report that the thing has been done. When this self-reliant quality is joined to executive power, loyalty and common sense, the result is a man whom you can trust.”
Yes, indeed, and that is as it should be. For while no man can be sure of the possibilities of his influence over other men, every man knows by his own conscience when he is putting forth his best effort, and when he is slacking. Of the many personal decisions which life puts upon a service officer, the main one is whether he chooses to swim upstream. If he says yes to that, and means it, all things then begin to fit into place. Then will develop gradually but surely that well-placed inner confidence which is the foundation of military character. From the knowing of what to do come the knowing of how to do, this is likewise important.
Psychologists tell us that every sense impression leaves a trace or imprint of itself on the mind, or in other words, what we are, and what we may become, is influenced in some measure by everything touching the circumference of our daily lives. The imprints become memories and ideas, and in their turn build up the consciousness, the reason and finally the will, which translates into physical action, the psychological purpose. In the process, moral character may be shaped and strengthened; but it will not be transformed if it is dross in the first place. That is something which every combat leader has learned in his tour under fire; the man of whom nobody speaks well, who is regarded as a social misfit of his comrades, will usually desert them under pressure. There are others who have the right look but will be just as quick to quit, and look to themselves, in a crisis; underneath, they are made of the same shoddy stuff as the derelict, but have learned a little more of the modern art of getting by. Leadership, be it ever so inspired, cannot make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. The majority is better than mean, and that from this may be developed the strength of the whole.
The minority had no basis for organic solidarity, as each of its number was motivated only by self-interest. Goodwill and weakness may be combined in one man; bad will and strength in another. High moral leading can lift the first man to excel himself; it will not reform the other. But there is no other sensible rule than that all men will be approached with trust, and treated as trustworthy until proved otherwise beyond reasonable doubt.
To transfer this thought to even the largest element in war, it will be seen that it is not primarily a cause which makes men loyal to each other, but the loyalty of men to each other which makes a cause. The unity which develops from man’s recognition of his dependence upon his fellows is the mainspring of every movement by which society, or any autonomy within it, moves forward.
(Adapted from The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Armed Forces Officer, by U. S. Department of Defense)

THE MAP OF LIFE

Man comes into the world with mental and moral characteristics which he can only very imperfectly influence and a large proportion of the external circumstances of his life lie wholly or mainly beyond his control. Every one also recognizes how large a part of the unhappiness of most men may be directly traced to their own voluntary and deliberate acts.
In the words of Burke, ‘It is the prerogative of man to be in a great degree a creature of his own making.’ There are men whose whole lives are spent in willing one thing and desiring the opposite and all morality depends upon the supposition that we have at least some freedom of choice between good and evil.
No human being can prevent himself from viewing certain acts with an indignation, shame, remorse, resentment, gratitude, enthusiasm, praise or blame, which would be perfectly unmeaning and irrational if these acts could not have been avoided. We can have no higher evidence on the subject than is derived from this fact. It is impossible to explain the mystery of free will, but until a man ceases to feel these emotions he has not succeeded in disbelieving in it. The feelings of all men and the vocabularies of all languages attest the universality of the belief.
Men continually forget that Happiness is a condition of Mind and not a disposition of circumstances, and one of the most common of errors is that of confusing happiness with the means of happiness, sacrificing the first for the attainment of the second. It is the error of the miser, who begins by seeking money for the enjoyment it procures and ends by making the mere acquisition of money his sole object, pursuing it to the sacrifice of all rational ends and pleasures. Circumstances and Character both contribute to Happiness, but the proportionate attention paid to one or other of these great departments not only varies largely with different individuals, but also with different nations and in different ages.
All the sensational philosophies from Bacon and Locke to our own day tend to concentrate attention on the external circumstances and conditions of happiness. And the same tendency will be naturally found in the most active, industrial and progressive nations; where life is very full and busy; where its competitions are most keen; where scientific discoveries are rapidly multiplying pleasures or diminishing pains; where town life with its constant hurry and change is the most prominent. In such spheres men naturally incline to seek happiness from without rather than from within, or, in other words, to seek it much less by acting directly on the mind and character than through the indirect method of improved circumstances.
Smoking in manhood, when practiced in moderation, is a very innocent and probably beneficent practice, but it is well known how deleterious it is to young boys, and how many of them have taken to it through no other motive than a desire to appear older than they are—that surest of all signs that we are very young. How often have the far more pernicious habits of drinking, or gambling, or frequenting corrupt society been acquired through a similar motive, or through the mere desire to enjoy the charm of a forbidden pleasure or to stand well with some dissipated companions! How large a proportion of lifelong female debility is due to an early habit of tight lacing, springing only from the silliest vanity! How many lives have been sacrificed through the careless recklessness which refused to take the trouble of changing wet clothes! How many have been shattered and shortened by excess in things which in moderation are harmless, useful, or praiseworthy,—by the broken blood-vessel, due to excess in some healthy athletic exercise or game; by the ruined brain overstrained in order to win some paltry prize! It is melancholy to observe how many lives have been broken down, ruined or corrupted in attempts to realize some supreme and unattainable desire; through the impulse of overmastering passion, of powerful and perhaps irresistible temptation. It is still sadder to observe how large a proportion of the failures of life may be ultimately traced to the most insignificant causes and might have been avoided without any serious effort either of intellect or will.
How different would have been the condition of the world, and how far greater would have been the popularity of strong monarchy if at the time when such a form of government generally prevailed rulers had had the intelligence to put before them the improvement of the health and the prolongation of the lives of their subjects as the main object of their policy rather than military glory or the acquisition of territory or mere ostentatious and selfish display!
It is very evident that a healthy, long and prosperous life is more likely to be attained by industry, moderation and purity than by the opposite courses. It is very evident that drunkenness and sensuality ruin health and shorten life; that idleness, gambling and disorderly habits ruin prosperity; that ill-temper, selfishness and envy kill friendship and provoke animosities and dislike; that in every well-regulated society there is at least a general coincidence between the path of duty and the path of prosperity; dishonesty, violence and disregard for the rights of others naturally and usually bringing their punishment either from law or from public opinion or from both.
The pleasures of vice are often real, but they are commonly transient and they leave legacies of suffering, weakness, or care behind them. The nobler pleasures for the most part grow and strengthen with advancing years. The passions of youth, when duly regulated, gradually transform themselves into habits, interests and steady affections, and it is in the long forecasts of life that the superiority of virtue as an element of happiness becomes most apparent.
Few things have done more harm in the world than disproportioned compassion. It is a law of our being that we are only deeply moved by sufferings we distinctly realize and the degrees in which different kinds of suffering appeal to the imagination bear no proportion to their real magnitude. The most benevolent man will read of an earthquake in Japan or a plague in South America with a callousness he would never display towards some untimely death or some painful accident in his immediate neighborhood, and in general the suffering of a prominent and isolated individual strikes us much more forcibly than that of an undistinguished multitude. Few deaths are so prominent, and therefore few produce such widespread compassion, as those of conspicuous criminals. It is no exaggeration to say that the death of an ‘interesting’ murderer will often arouse much stronger feelings than were ever excited by the death of his victim; or by the deaths of brave soldiers who perished by disease or by the sword in some obscure expedition in a remote country. This mode of judgment acts promptly upon conduct.
To see things in their true proportion, to escape the magnifying influence of a morbid imagination, should be one of the chief aims of life, and in no fields is it more needed than in those we have been reviewing. At the same time every age has its own ideal moral type towards which the strongest and best influences of the time converge. The history of morals is essentially a history of the changes that take place not so much in our conception of what is right and wrong as in the proportionate place and prominence we assign to different virtues and vices. There are large groups of moral qualities which in some ages of the world’s history have been regarded as of supreme importance, while in other ages they are thrown into the background, and there are corresponding groups of vices which are treated in some periods as very serious and in others as very trivial.
The human mind has much more power of distinguishing between right and wrong, and between true and false, than of estimating with accuracy the comparative gravity of opposite evils. It is nearly always right in judging between right and wrong. It is generally wrong in estimating degrees of guilt, and the root of its error lies in the extreme difficulty of putting ourselves into the place of those whose characters or circumstances are radically different from our own. This want of imagination acts widely on our judgment of what is good as well as of what is bad.
If we look again into the vice and sin that undoubtedly disfigure the world we shall find much reason to believe that what is exceptional in human nature is not the evil tendency but the restraining conscience, and that it is chiefly the weakness of the distinctively human quality that is the origin of the evil. Most crimes do not spring from anything in the original and primal desire but from the imperfection of this higher, distinct or superadded element in our nature. The crimes of dishonesty and envy, when duly analyzed, have at their basis simply a desire for the desirable—a natural and inevitable feeling. What is absent is the restraint which makes men refrains from taking or trying to take desirable things that belong to another.
(Adapted from The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Map of Life, by William Edward Hartpole Lecky)