Quotes About Authority

Biologists invent the contraceptive pill – and the Pope doesn't know what to do about it. Computer scientists develop the Internet – and rabbis argue whether orthodox Jews should be allowed to surf it. Feminist thinkers call upon women to take possession of their bodies – and learned muftis debate how to confront such incendiary ideas.

Piyasay? idare edenler bir karara varman?z için bin y?l oturup beklemeyecektir.

Como você faz as pessoas acreditarem em uma ordem imaginada como o cristianismo, a democracia ou o capitalismo? Primeiro, você nunca admite que a ordem é imaginada. Você sempre insiste que a ordem que sustenta a sociedade é uma realidade objetiva criada pelos grandes deuses ou pelas leis da natureza.

Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having

La Iglesia católica ha sobrevivido durante siglos, no por transmitir un «gen del celibato» de un Papa al siguiente, sino por transmitir los relatos del Nuevo Testamento y de la Ley canónica católica.

Written language may have been conceived as a modest way of describing reality, but it gradually became a powerful way to reshape reality. When official reports collided with objective reality, it was often reality that had to give way.

Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator.

As bureaucracies accumulate power, they become immune to their own mistakes. Instead of changing their stories to fit reality, they can change reality to fit their stories. In the end external reality matches their bureaucratic fantasies, but only because they forced reality to do so.

We are conquering you for your own benefit,' said the Persians.

Yet it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable. For

Democracy assumes that human feelings reflect a mysterious and profound 'free will', that this 'free will' is the ultimate source of authority, and that while some people are more intelligent than others, all humans are equally free. Like Einstein and Dawkins, an illiterate maid also has free will, hence on election day her feelings - represented by her vote - count just as much as anybody else's.

Does the data about my DNA, my brain, and my life belong to me, to the government, to a corporation, or to the human collective?

La mayoría de las jerarquías sociopolíticas carecen de una base lógica o biológica: no son más que la perpetuación de acontecimientos aleatorios sostenidos por mitos.

To say that a social order is maintained by military force immediately raises the question: what maintains the military order? It is impossible to organise an army solely by coercion. At least some of the commanders and soldiers must truly believe in something, be

All humanist sects believe that human experience is the supreme source of authority and meaning, yet they interpret human experience in different ways.

La repetición eterna confiere poder al relato, pues implica que este es el devenir natural de las cosas, y que si Arjuna evita el combate o si Simba rehúsa convertirse en rey, estarán rebelándose contra las leyes mismas de la naturaleza.

When a single professional makes almost all the decisions, mistakes can be catastrophic.

Liberalism sanctifies the narrating self, and allows it to vote in the polling stations, in the supermarket and in the marriage market. For centuries this made good sense, because though the narrating self believed in all kinds of fictions and fantasies, no alternative system knew me better. Yet once we have a system that really does know me better, it will be foolhardy to leave authority in the hands of the narrating self.

These are sets of rules that, despite existing only in our imagination, we believe to be as real and inviolable as gravity. 'If

Soon authority might shift again – from humans to algorithms.

Standardisation was a boon to emperors.

Why are revolutions so rare? Why do the masses sometimes clap and cheer for centuries on end, doing everything the man on the balcony commands them, even though they could in theory charge forward at any moment and tear him to pieces?

John Watson, una autoridad reconocida de la puericultura en la década de 1920, advertía severamente a los padres: «No abracéis ni beséis nunca [a vuestros hijos], no dejéis nunca que se sienten en vuestro regazo.

Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths.