As well as fear a false view of people leads to hero leaders, who always fail. Put not your trust in new leaders, better systems, new organisations or regulatory reorganisation. They may well be good and necessary, but will to some degree fail. Human sin means pinning hopes on individuals is always a mistake, and assuming that any organisation is able to have such good systems that human failure will be eliminated is naïve.

I wonder if he has been reading an advanced copy of this?

The assumption which we are correctly making is the vast majority of people are in favour of what we are doing.1

Read that again… ”The assumption which we are correctly making is the vast majority of people are in favour of what we are doing.”

I am really, really impressed, that the satire of Bertolt Brecht is alive and well and living in Tory-run Medway Council

1. From here
   BBC News Thames Estuary airport: Row over Medway ‘fighting fund’
   

“Shocking” is too soft a word to describe the crimes of the financial sector. They are almost thrilling in their creative abundance – laundering money for drugs cartels; defrauding old people, small businesses, investors and shareholders; rigging markets; sugarcoating dud loans to look like good ones; loading the world economy with ever greater levels of risk and throwing millions of people out of work. And so on. All the time, they were enriching nobody but themselves. The banks and their buddies have been on a crime spree that would have glazed over the eyes of Al Capone.

Read it all

[Jung, Reich and Lawrence] tried, in their disparate ways, to go so far beyond psychologising that it would become a way of life, that culture would be destroyed as a system of controlling consolations and reconstructed as a system of more immediate releases of impulse… They did not so much seek some new consolation as that culture of release which would render the many consolations of high culture unnecessary. However, what they achieved was new consolations, locked forever in a struggle against defensive cultural ideologies.

Philip Rieff, ‘The Analytic Attitude’, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, (2006), p. 29

With nothing shared beyond a commitment to the self, which turns out to be a commitment to nothing, the individual lacks essential resources for flourishing in ordinary times and for solace in periods of great need. The anything goes mentality of niche marketing prevails, driving what qualifies as reading and thinking downward to new lows.

Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, “Introduction (2006),” in Triumph of the Therapeutic: uses of faith after Freud, by Philip Rieff, 40th Anniversary Edition. (ISI Books, 2006), vii–xxvi.

Did I mention it’s being published on 11 April?

Here at the Beaker Folk, we are very keen to embrace people who claim to be “spiritual but not religious”. I find they tend to have very high discretionary spending levels, on things like self-help books, rosaries, tea lights and aromatherapy oils. Importantly, they aren’t often involved in regular standing-orders to religious organisations – which can be so tedious to transfer across – especially without asking them.

Exactly!

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