If you look at any civilization, Berlin said, you will find a particular pattern of life that shows up again and again, that rules the age. Because of that pattern, certain ideas become popular and others fall out of favor. If you can isolate the governing pattern that a culture obeys, he believed, you can explain and understand the world that shapes how people think, feel and act at a distinct time in history.#1695•
It shapes our ideas about what's normal and what we can expect from life. It channels our lives in a certain direction, setting out strict boundaries that we unconsciously learn to live inside#1668•
We develop a strong sense of what's expected of us at work, and in our families and communities — even if we sometimes choose not to meet those expectations#1660•
We use them to capture our yesterdays and secure our tomorrows. Stories tell us what we can expect from other people, and from life.#1688•
A good story, well told, makes you realize you were yearning for something you had no name for, something you didn't even know you wanted.#1697•
"Personal myths are not what you think they are. They are not false beliefs. They are not the stories you tell yourself to explain your circumstances and behavior. Your personal mythology is, rather, the vibrant infrastructure that informs your life, whether or not you are aware of it. Consciously and unconsciously, you live by your mythology."#1694•
Given all of these problems in the public sector, the economic story says the solution is to run government like a business. Citizens become customers. Governments start to focus on what businesses focus on: improving quality and performance, cutting costs, being productive, providing better customer service, being more responsive to customers, and benchmarking against best practices.
Cost control and performance improvement supersede the old philosophy of development and investment for the public good.
Competition is introduced into government through outsourcing, deregulation, privatization, and commercialization, in order to make government effective and responsive and therefore worthy of your support.#1655•
Public libraries embodied something called library faith: the belief that books change lives#1676•
The United Nations called the public library "a living force for education, culture and information" and "an essential agent for the fostering of peace and spiritual welfare through the minds of men and women."#1670•
You in the West have the spiritually poorest of the poor much more than you have the physically poor. Often among the rich are very spiritually poor people. I find it is easy to give a plate of rice to a hungry person, to furnish a bed to a person who has no bed, but to console or to remove the bitterness, anger, and loneliness that comes from being spiritually deprived, that takes a long time.
—MOTHER TERESA#1685•
Callahan points out that the market model of health care will never encourage us to use less medical care, will never put limits on our desire for ever better health, and will never limit the development and use of health care technology, no matter how expensive it becomes or how incremental the health gains might be.
The economic story will never encourage us to accept our own inevitable aging and death.
Instead, the economic story in medicine orients us away from all of that, keeps us struggling for ever-longer life through advances in medical technology that simultaneously produce billions of dollars for the medical industry#1665•
Truth in science mattered. Galileo had linked the two, saying: "The conclusions of natural science are true and necessary, and the judgment of man has nothing to do with them." What he meant was that a scientific result was what it was — you couldn't just create a different outcome because you didn't like what you'd found.#1699•
President John F. Kennedy said, "The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation's purpose, and is a test of the quality of a nation's civilization."#1683•
The difference between high art and low art, says philosopher and visual art scholar Larry Shiner, was thought of as the difference between fine art and mass art, complex and simple, original and formulaic, critical and conformist, challenging and escapist, and (often) a small audience versus a large audience — the difference, some would say, between literary fiction and detective novels, or opera and pop music#1661•
Instead of striking out on my own, I had conformed to a way of life and modes of thought that had often seemed alien. As a result, I found myself in a wasteland, an inauthentic existence, in which I struggled mightily but fruitlessly to do what I was told.
—KAREN ARMSTRONG#1680•
A monoculture based on economic values and assumptions develops. As the years go by, we scarcely remember any other way to think, any other way to live. Other stories that represent other ways of thinking and being are lost to one ultimate value: whatever is economic.#1678•
The kind of creativity that emerges from working on what interests you personally, regardless of what anyone else thinks about it, also requires an independent spirit. Joseph Campbell believed that if you follow your bliss, "you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living…follow your bliss and don't be afraid," he said, "and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be."#1671•
In a society grown rigid with ideology, Havel said, you come to accept that you should live according to that society's values and assumptions. If you were to refuse to conform, there could be trouble. You could be isolated, alienated, reproached for being idealistic, or scorned for not being a team player.
You know what it is you are supposed to do, and you do it, not least to show that you're doing it.
You go along to get along, he said, and so you confirm to others that certain things in fact must be done if you are to get along in life.
If you fail to act as you're expected to, others will view your behavior as abnormal, think you arrogant for believing you're above the rules, or assume you've dropped out of society.
The society grown rigid with ideology gives you and everyone else the illusion that the way things are is the way things are meant to be; the story you hear is natural.
It has been told and retold for years.
Everyone tells it.#1653•
Oscar Wilde put it this way: "The fatal errors of life are not due to man's being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one's finest moment. They are due to man's being logical. There is a wide difference."#1692•
Wendy Parkins and Geoffrey Craig, "slow living is a process whereby everyday life — in all its pace and complexity, frisson and routine — is approached with care and attention…is above all an attempt to live in the present in a meaningful, sustainable, thoughtful and pleasurable way." In that way, the Slow Food movement, as a parallel structure, serves the human struggle to live more freely and truthfully.#1681•
As designer Ilse Crawford put it, "In creating our homes we have failed to pay attention to many of our true needs, the ones that really make a home warm and nurture those that live in it#1654•
"It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it."#1673•
What it means to be human will always encompass more than economic values and assumptions. If you fail to transcend the economic story, you risk paying a heavy internal price. If you do transcend it, you risk paying a heavy external price — but you also gain a chance to live a different kind of life, a chance to help create and sustain the independent life of society that comes from living in a wider spectrum of values.#1663•
2. The One Story
In a monoculture though, that single perspective becomes so engrained as the only reasonable reality that we begin to forget our other stories, and fail to see the monoculture in its totality, never mind question it. We accept it as true simply because we've heard its story so often and live immersed in it day after day#1667•
insidious tapestry of beliefs and assumptions that fall into three categories: who you are as a human being, what the world is like, and how you and that world interact.#1658•
Selfishness involves focusing on yourself to the exclusion of, or at the expense of others. Self-interest, on the other hand, is about doing what you want and working to improve your condition or your situation#1662•
The story says that you act as you do because you're trying to get what you want, and the rest of us can tell what you want by watching how you act#1657•
You are the sole and final authority on your preferences, and your behavior is an expression of those preferences.#1689•
Your wants are unlimited, and you're motivated to try to satisfy those unlimited wants even though you'll never be able to#1687•
The story says you're most free when you have as much choice as possible in as many areas of life as possible#1690•
the more information you have, the story says, the better choice you'll be able to make#1652•
To summarize then, in the economic story, you're a rational, self-interested, entrepreneurial individual who is trying to satisfy unlimited wants, whatever they may be#1696•
9. The Monoculture Effect
But that independent spirit is hampered by the monoculture's demands for conformity. When you conform to the monoculture's version of who you are and what the world is like, you lose your freedom along with your ability to be truly innovative in terms of your own life#1672•