Education and historyEducation and history"Ignorance is the root cause of Suffering..." (Buddha, 563 BC to 483 BC)
"Socrates taught that the solution to the main problems of society is education." - (Plato 360 BC).
"It is only the ignorant who despise education." Publilius Syrus (~100 BC), Maxims
"Knowledge is power." Sir Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626), Religious Meditations, Of Heresies, 1597
"The pen is mightier than the sword." - Franklin (1700s)
"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." - H. G. Wells .(1920s +_)
"If factories are developed
Before libraries built,
Then folks will be mistreated,
And churches will teach guilt."
from Ode to Emma.by Capt. Nemo, 2002
Effective thinking: "The main barriers to effective thinking and emoting include these: (1) Some people are too stupid to think clearly. Or (2) they posess suficient intelligence to think straight, but just do not know how to do so. Or (3) They posess enough intelligence and education to think clearly but act too disturbedly or neurotically to put their intelligence to good use....neurosis essentially consists of stupid behavior by nonstupid people." [1] "The principle, which we have recently rediscovered from the many therapy sessions with literally hundreds of clients, originally appeared in the writing of several ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, notably the famous Stoic Epictetus, who in the first century A.D. wrote in the 'Enchiridon': 'Men feel disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them.' William Shakespeare, many centuries later, rephrased this thought in 'Hamlet': 'There [exists] nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.'" [2] Abraham Maslow said: "...self actualization is not only an end state but also the process of actualizing one's potentialities at any time, in any amount. It is, for example, a matter of becoming smarter by studying if one is an intelligent person." [3] "My investigations on self-actualization were not planned to be research and did not start out as research. They started out as the effort of a young intellectual to try and understand two of his teachers whom he loved, adorted, and admired, and who were very wonderfull people. It was a kind of high-IQ devotion. I was not content simply to adore, but sought to understand why these two people were so different from the run-of-the-mill people in the world. These two peple were Ruth Benedict and Max Wertheimer."[4] From a web site about Maslow: "Maslow took an intelligence test given by Edward Thorndike, on which he scored 195, the second highest ever recorded." [5] ________________ [1] "A New Guide To Rational Behavior" by Albert Ellis, PhD and Robert Harper, PhD, 1961, pg 37 [2] Ellis and Harper , pg 33 [3] "The Farther Reaches of Human Nature", ABraham Maslow, 1971, pg 46 [4] Maslow, pg 40 [5] http://facultyfp.salisbury.edu/iewhite/Maslow.htm
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by Buckminster Fuller
Grunch of Giants by Buckminster Fuller
Time-Binding Trust.part of Future Positive, a Krorzbski and Fuller inspired site
The European Society for General Semantics has the entire text of some of Korzybski's books on-line.
It was a fundamental error of the old evaluations to postulate 'human nature' as 'evil'. 'Human nature' depends to a large extent on the character of our creeds or rationalizations, etc., for these ultimately build up our socio-cultural and other environments from Manhood of Humanity by Alfred Korzybski
As A Man Thinketh by James Allen (about 1890)
"A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts." James Allen
"We are what we think, because we became what we thought." Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.