Saturday, June 14, 2008

The Global Crisis: Food, Water and Fuel. Three Fundamental Necessities of Life in Jeopardy

"Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people." Henry Kissinger


"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." George Orwell

The Mackenzie Institute

The Lessons of History

August, 1998

1. Nobody learns from history.
What experience and history teach is this - that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on the principles deduced from it.
- G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History

2. Human motivations never change while our worldviews and expressions often do.
Please witness the two following ways of saying the same thing: the first from a traditional Navaho war chant, and the second an unofficial slogan from the US Army Rangers:
First: Hi! Ni! I am the man of flint! That's me! Four lightnings zigzag from me and return.
Second: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest m*****f***er in it.

3. Problems don't always have solutions.
My only solution for the problem of habitual accidents and, so far, nobody has asked me for my solution, is to stay in bed all day. Even then, there is always the chance that you will fall out.
- Robert Benchley, Chips off the old Benchley

4. Violence either solves problems or changes them.
That war is an evil is something that we all know, and it would be pointless to go on cataloguing all the disadvantages involved in it. No one is forced to go to war by ignorance, nor, if he thinks he will gain by it, is he kept out of it by fear. The fact is that one side thinks that the profits to be won outweigh the risks to be incurred, and the other side is ready to face this rather than accept an immediate loss.
- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

5. What goes around, comes around.
Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so unto them: for this is the law and the prophets.
- Matthew 7:12 (King James Version)

6. Trouble slides in on an exponential curve.
Go sir, gallop, and don't forget that the world was made in six days. You can ask me for anything you like, except time.
- Napoleon Bonaparte

7. Never discount randomness.
A little neglect may breed great mischief... for want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for want of a horse the rider was lost.
- Benjamin Franklin, preface to The Courteous Reader

8. History doesn't repeat itself, it just looks that way.
Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can only see one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave.
- H.A.L. Fisher, History of Europe

9. Progress is not inevitable.
For civilization is not something inborn or imperishable: It must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption in its financing or its transmission may bring it to an end.
- Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage

10. Today's radical may be tomorrow's conservative.
What have we learned in the middle of the journey? In brief, that the radical future is an illusion and that the American present is worth defending; and that we were part of a destructive generation whose work is not over yet.
- Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s

11. Judge intention by core interest and power bases, not by statements.
With affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other. - Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit

12. Good doesn't always triumph.
O judgement! Thou art fled to brutish beasts / And men have lost their reason.
- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar III, ii [110]

13. All politicians are crooked.
Politicians [are] a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people, and who, to say the most of them, are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men. I say this with the greater freedom because, being a politician myself, none can regard it as personal.
- Abraham Lincoln, Speech, 1837

14. God does march on the side with the biggest battalions.
Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not.
- Hilaire Belloc, The Modern Traveller

15. It is a mistake to legislate people's behaviour.
Adam was but human - this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden.
- Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson

16. Mother Nature is more dangerous than we are.
Since the beginning of history malaria has killed half of the men, women and children that have died on the planet. It has outperformed all wars, all famines and all other epidemics.
- Andrew Nikiforuk, The Fourth Horseman

17. Talent only appears when the circumstances are right.
When a rising generation of educated people does not have to worry about securing its livelihood, about choice of profession, when it does not feel obligated to become accountants or lawyers, and can risk becoming artists or philosophers, or founding new theatres, or writing poetry, because it knows it can always find the means for making a living, that period always witnesses a cultural explosion.
- Norman Cantor, The American Century

18. Keep governments on a lean diet - or else.
The Emperor's unnumerable officials kept an eye even upon the humblest citizen... staggering under his crushing burden of taxes, in a state which was practically bankrupt, the citizen of every class had now become a mere cog in the vast machinery of government. In so far as the ancient world was one of progress in civilization, its history ended with the accession of Diocletian.
- J.H. Breasted, Ancient Times

19. The main factors are out of our hands.
To discuss civilization is to discuss space, land and its contours, climate, vegetation, animal species and natural or other advantages. It is also to discuss what humanity has made of these basic conditions.
- Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilization

20. Never trust those who would hammer square pegs into round holes.
Anyone who had once learned to submit absolutely to a collective belief and to renounce his eternal right to freedom and the equally eternal duty of individual responsibility will persist in this attitude, and will be able to set out with the same credulity and the same lack of criticism in the reverse direction, if another and manifestly 'better' belief is foisted upon his alleged idealism.
- Carl G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self

21. Never attribute to cleverness that which is explainable by stupidity, serendipity and error.
The chapter of accidents is the longest chapter in the book.
- John Wilkes, attrib.