Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble â and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology â that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes.... That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.... Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago."
ââAleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Chapter 4, p. 173
Today's policies and political activity treat people like pawns. More than ever before, attempts will be made to use people like cogs in a wheel. People will be handled like puppets on a string, and everyone will think that this reflects the greatest progress imaginable.
Rudolph Steiner
Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy. The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it. It doesn't take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle. True courage is being afraid, and going ahead and doing your job anyhow, that's what courage is. You can't help someone get up a hill without getting closer to the top yourself. You learn far more from negative leadership than from positive leadership. Because you learn how not to do it. And, therefore, you learn how to do it.
Any soldier worth his salt should be antiwar. And still there are things worth fighting for.
One afternoon in June 1995, I found myself trapped in the Bodhi Tree, a stucco-fronted bookstore on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood where New Age wisdom-seekers sip herbal tea while discussing the latest ravings of Shirley MacLaine. I was freaking out because the professor Iâd travelled 6,000 miles to meet had apparently stood me up. Stephen OâLeary, of the University of Southern California, had just published Arguing the Apocalypse, a prize-winning study of the rhetorical techniques of televangelists. I was researching my own book about the end of the world and was desperate to pick his brains. He was almost two hours late and the wind chimes were driving me nuts.
I liked to snack on benzodiazepines, which I always think go nicely with Californian sunsets
I was seriously considering flying back to London when this tubby little bearded guy scuttled in, babbling excuses and making a squeaky fuss about the best place to sit on the veranda. He wore shorts and Birkenstocks. Then he launched into his Aristotelian theory of millennial rhetoric, speaking so fast that he lost me in seconds. Weâre not going to hit it off, I thought, not realising that my life had changed forever.
