A Universal of Human Conduct

There is one all-important law of human conduct. If we obey that law, we shall almost never get into trouble. In fact, that law, if obeyed, will bring us countless friends and constant happiness. But the very instant we break the law, we shall get into endless trouble. The law is this: Always make the other person feel important. John Dewey, as we have already noted, said that the desire to be important is the deepest urge in human nature; and William James said, “The deepest principle in h...

 "Having" Mode and "Being" Mode

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 happier levels of grace and intellectual repose.” She believed that every investment and allowance should be made to support a leisure class—a fortunati—not so that its member...

 We Need Play to Learn the Rules of the Game for the Civil...

The Real Significance of Play.—This scheme is, doubtless, imperfect, as critics of Groos’s book have taken occasion to point out, but the idea which underlies it all is a most suggestive and illuminating one, when rightly understood. In his latest work on the play of man, which has recently appeared, Groos makes clear this point (253, p. 492), when he observes: ‘I presuppose everywhere the existence of innate impulses (Triebe), and assume that these have only led to play-exercise (Spiel...

 The Need for Moral Universals in Democracy

Working societies — if they are to endure, grow, and cohere, if they are to prosper, hang together, and really mature — need moral universals. Moral universals are simply things that people believe everyone should have. In the UK, those things — those moral universals — are healthcare and media and welfare. In Germany, they are healthcare and media and welfare and higher education. And so on. Moral universals anchor a society in a genuinely shared prosperity. Not just...

 The Need for Science-Based Organization

Some time shortly after the invention of the graphical Internet, it became ripely apparent that humanity was fucking itself with its own technology and was on the fast path toward societal morbidity. We maximized energy extraction without perfecting clean use, accelerated manufacturing technologies and global supply chains without developing socioeconomic models to cope with the disruptions, and modified life itself without having any perspective on what modifications would actually, in the ...

 Gamification Pattern Building Mechanic

Ms. Forsythe divides her class into four teams (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome). Each team, over the course of the unit, learns about all four artistic cultures but becomes an expert in one. For a 20- to 30-minute exercise in discerning and judging the difference among these artistic cultures, Ms. Forsythe displays a piece of sculpture from each of the four cultures onto a large piece of heavy paper or cardboard and then cuts that image into smaller tiles and tosses all of the pieces to...

 Hero of "Brave New World"

The hero of Brave New World is John, a young man who grew up on an Indian reservation in New Mexico. The reservation is inhabited by primitive peoples and maintained by the benevolent world government as a tourist attraction. It exists so that the civilized tourists can observe from a distance the nasty and brutish lives of people who have the misfortune to be unprotected by the cushions and comforts of technology. On the reservation, traditional religions and traditional customs are tolerate...