Quotes About Structure

An aim, an ambition, provides the structure necessary for action. An aim provides a destination, a point of contrast against the present, and a framework, within which all things can be evaluated. An aim defines progress and makes such progress exciting. An aim reduces anxiety, because if you have no aim everything can mean anything or nothing, and neither of those two options makes for a tranquil spirit.

It indicates clearly that people need ordering principles, and that chaos otherwise beckons.

creates habitable chaos out of order

Being of any reasonable sort appears to require limitation.

El miedo es la postura a priori, la respuesta natural a todo para lo que no se ha designado e incorporado una estructura de adaptación conductual.

Los seres humanos son curiosos sobre la estructura y la función de todo, y no iba a ser menos en el caso de ellos mismos; nuestra capacidad para contar historias refleja nuestra capacidad para describirnos a nosotros mismos.

The person who is speaking in this manner believes that winning the argument makes him right, and that doing so necessarily validates the assumption-structure of the dominance hierarchy he most identifies with. This is often—and unsurprisingly—the hierarchy within which he has achieved the most success, or the one with which he is most temperamentally aligned. Almost all discussions involving politics or economics unfold in this manner,

Un acontecimiento significativo existe en la frontera entre el orden y el caos.

Everyone requires a story to structure their perceptions and actions in what would otherwise be the overwhelming chaos of being.

That's things falling apart, like Osiris, severed into pieces. That's the structure of the person or the state disintegrating under the influence of a malign force. That's the chaos of the underworld emerging, like a flood, to subsume familiar ground. But it's not yet Hell.

Every society is already characterized by patterned behavior; otherwise it would be pure conflict and no "society" at all.

We might instead note with gratitude that a complex, sophisticated culture allows for many games and many successful players, and that a well-structured culture allows the individuals that compose it to play and to win, in many different fashions.

For Nietzsche and Dostoevsky alike, freedom—even the ability to act—requires constraint. For this reason, they both recognized the vital necessity of the dogma of the Church. The individual must be constrained, moulded—even brought close to destruction—by a restrictive, coherent disciplinary structure, before he or she can act freely and competently.

Social Institutions Are Necessary—but Insufficient

All these thinkers, all centrally concerned with pathology both individual and cultural, came to the same conclusion: lies warp the structure of Being. Untruth corrupts the soul and the state alike, and one form of corruption feeds the other.

If you are disciplined and privilege the future over the present you can change the structure of reality in your favour.

Un largo periodo de falta de libertad —de adhesión a una estructura interpretativa particular— es necesario para que se desarrolle una mente libre.

Necesitamos reglas, patrones y valores, tanto en soledad como en compañía.

Aristotle argued that though specific rules, laws and customs differed from place to place, what does not differ is that in all places human beings, by their nature, have a proclivity to make rules, laws and customs. To put this in modern terms, it seems that all human beings are, by some kind of biological endowment, so ineradicably concerned with morality that we create a structure of laws and rules wherever we are. The idea that human life can be free of moral concerns is a fantasy.

Long ago, in the dim mists of time, we began to realize that reality was structured as if it could be bargained with. We learned that behaving properly now, in the present—regulating our impulses, considering the plight of others—could bring rewards in the future, in a time and place that did not yet exist.

The neglect and mistreatment that is part and parcel of poorly structured or even entirely absent disciplinary approaches can be deliberate—motivated by explicit, conscious (if misguided) parental motives. But more often than not, modern parents are simply paralyzed by the fear that they will no longer be liked or even loved by their children

set your house in order

An idea has an aim. It wants something. It posits a value structure. An idea believes that what it is aiming for is better than what it has now. It reduces the world to those things that aid or impede its realization, and it reduces everything else to irrelevance. An idea defines figure against ground. An idea is a personality, not a fact.

Dominance hierarchies are older than trees