My thinking phase: I am writing this quickly before my LPW and so I can't flesh things out but if you have any comments please make them!

- What is the best way to use my license to shape the creeds, habits, mythologies, rituals of the institutions I belong to? How do we want to shape our institutional boundaries? "Society isn’t what any particular person does; instead, society sets limits on what a person might do." I wrote that down after hearing it one day and think it applies

- Institutions and Burcu. The street children of Ankara and summer camp.

-Exupery said "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." This class makes me yearn for the vast and endless sea. How do I build the ship?

- Is there individual prerogative in law enforcement? What I want is to be the anti-Mike Nifong http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Nifong. How do I get there?

- There are no more seesaws at parks in the United States. We have let people litigate them out of existence. Our legal system over-insures the consequences of individual choice (in the non-Arnoldian sense) and creates collective inertia. As I was writing this in Lenfest, I went into the cafe to get a banana. The employee offered me another one for free because she was about to toss the food. Dining services won't donate it because of the potential liability for giving it to a food bank or homeless people. This is not the first time I have encountered this answer when asking why food is being tossed. Law should not be used as a barrier to a hungry person getting free food.

- "betabilitarian"- this is a term Eben referred to in office hours today. If I understood the brief discussion correctly, we cannot measure our choices against a normative standard. The only choice we have is to place our bets and play. What degree of risk am I/are we willing to assume? That degree of risk defines the boundaries of my/our winnings (and losses).

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I really like the Exupery quote, though for an entirely different reason than why you posted it. To borrow a little Kant, I think it captures the need to treat people as people, rather than as means to a certain end. The irony for me is that I generally operate under the former presumption. I dislike giving up control, and similarly, I don't delegate responsibility as well as I should. When I do delegate, it's for a specific task--I might explain what I want and what the goals are, but I'm basically asking for a mechanical task that serves a larger vision that only I have. I have people gather wood while I give orders. It's hard for me to imagine getting things done by inspiring those I lead to adopt my goals and setting them loose, rather than using them like chess pieces.

The quote could be a jumping off point for an essay on how to achieve things without using people. Just a thought :).

-- RonMazor - 19 Feb 2010

I think another interesting aspect of the Exupery quote is the implicit point that to persuade others to support an idea one needs a positive vision, not only a critique. Exupery's exemplary orator is not criticizing a landlocked life - he is offering an inspiring vision of an alternative. I think you can see this in Martin Luther King Jr.'s decision to structure his famous speech around a dream of racial unity, as a positive goal to strive for. This also relates to the "know what you want" part of Thurgood Marshall's advice about effecting change. One has to know more than what one doesn't want. Putting the two in dialogue, Exupery's advice about inspiring people with a positive vision may be part of the answer to Marshall's requirement that you know "exactly how to get it."

This is something I have given some thought to because the cause I work on most is environmentalism, and there is often a public perception that the environmental movement is mainly against things, not for things.

-- DevinMcDougall - 21 Feb 2010