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Over the ensuing two decades, editors amended policies to cope with conspiracy theorists, revisionist historians, militant fandoms, and other perennial goblins of the open web. There were the three core content guidelines of Neutral Point of View, Verifiability, and No Original Research; the five pillars of Wikipedia…
They are without fears and without desires, dominated by no falsehood, sharing no error, loving without illusion, suffering without impatience, reposing in the quietude of eternal thought... a Magus cannot be ignorant, for magic implies superiority, mastership, majority, and majority signifies emancipation by…
A monk asked Ts'ui-wei, "For what reason did the First Patriarch come from the West?" Ts'ui-wei answered, "Pass me that chin-rest." As soon as the monk passed it, Ts'ui-wei hit him with it. Another master was having tea with two of his students when he suddenly tossed his fan to one of them, saying, "What's this?" The…
It was a basic Confucian principle that "it is man who makes truth great, not truth which makes man great." For this reason, "humanness" or ''human-heartedness" ( fen a ) was always felt to be superior to "righteousness" ( i b ), since man himself is greater than any idea which he may invent. There are times when…
If any have offended against thee, consider first: What is my relation to men, and that we are made for one another; and in another respect, I was made to be set over them, as a ram over the flock or a bull over the herd. But examine the matter from first principles, from this: If all things are not mere atoms, it is…
The American essayist and biographer Agnes Repplier saw leisure as necessary for the completion not just of individuals but of civilizations. Leisure, she noted, “has a distinct and honorable place wherever nations are released from the pressure of their first rude needs, their first homely toil, and the rise of…
All were expressing a leisure ethic: a worldview in which a preference for free time and intrinsically motivated pursuits is accompanied by an understanding of how time can best be spent. To most people today, the notion of a leisure ethic will sound foreign, paradoxical, and indeed subversive, even though leisure is…
1-46. A strong correlation exists between deception and surprise. The more forms of surprise built into the deception plan, the more likely it will overwhelm the target. These forms of surprise include size, activity, location, unit, time, equipment, intent, and style. One effect of surprise is the cry-wolf syndrome…
1-42. Magruder’s principle states that it is generally easier to induce the deception target to maintain a preexisting belief than to deceive the deception target for the purpose of changing that belief. Magruder’s principle exploits target biases and the human tendency to confirm exiting beliefs. Magruder’s principle…
At its heart, a counterinsurgency is an armed struggle for the support of the population. This support can be achieved or lost through information engagement, strong representative government, access to goods and services, fear, or violence. This armed struggle also involves eliminating insurgents who threaten the…
Other examples of remarkable societal resilience are more recent. We can consider, for example, the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945. The bomb the United States dropped was 1,500 times more powerful than any previously used.32 The fireball at the hypocenter of the blast reached several thousand…
For years, many scientists warned of the dangers that asteroids pose to life on Earth, but for many years they weren’t listened to. Even after it was first proposed, in 1980, that the dinosaurs were killed off by a huge asteroid striking the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico,1 there was, in the words of leading astronomer…
The best that we have seen so far is a poor guide to what is possible. To get some inkling of this, consider the life of a rich man in Britain in 1700—a man with access to the best food, health care, and luxuries available at the time. For all his advantages, such a man could easily die of smallpox, syphilis, or…
Imagine living, in order of birth, through the life of every human being who has ever lived.1 Your first life begins about three hundred thousand years ago in Africa.2 After living that life and dying, you travel back in time and are reincarnated as the second-ever person, born slightly later than the first. Once that…
‘Play’ was once a great slogan of liberation. Richard Neville: “The new beautiful freaks will teach us all how to play again (and they’ll suffer society’s penalty).” Play was once the battering ram to break down the Chinese walls of alienated work, of divided labor. Only look at what has become of play. Play is no…
Signification, which is the only function of a word admitted by semantics, reaches perfection in the sign. Whether folk-songs were rightly or wrongly called upper-class culture in decay, their elements have only acquired their popular form through a long process of repeated transmission. The spread of popular songs…
What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled…
Modern governments, their hands increasingly tied by the robber-barons of global finance, often try to assert their power with their feet: by kicking out at another high-profile social problem, real or imagined, with another big policy initiative. Usually they come up with an accompanying raft of new laws. Legislative…
“If it ain’t a capitalist market, what in the sweet Lord’s name are we stepping into when we enter Amazon.com?†a student at the University of Texas once asked me. “A type of digital fief,†I replied. “A post‑capitalist one, whose historical roots remain in feudal Europe.†Under feudalism, the…
I.A The Three Guidelines The Dao of Great Learning lies in making bright virtue brilliant; in making the people new; in coming to rest at the limit of the good. Only after wisdom comes to rest does one possess certainty; only after one possesses certainty can one become tranquil; only after one becomes tranquil can…