School of life great thinkers

Aristotle

How to make yourself heard:

He makes some timeless points: you have to soothe people's fears, you have to see the emotional side of the issue -- is someone's pride on the line? Are they feeling embarrassed? -- and edge around it accordingly. You have to make it funny because attention spans are short, and you might have to use illustrations and examples to make your point come alive.

Stoics

Luck vs. achievement

The Stoics were fascinated by the Roman goddess Fortuna. She was represented holding a cornucopia filled with goodies (money, love, etc.) in one hand, and a tiller, for changing the course of life, in the other. Depending on her mood, she might throw you down a perfect job or a beautiful relationship, and then the next minute, simply because she felt like it, watch you choke to death on a fishbone. The task of the wise person is therefore never to believe in the gifts of fortune: fame, money, power, love, health -- these are never our own. Our grip on them must at all times be light and deeply wary.

Perspective

Look at the night sky to see how insignificant you are. Nothing that happens to us, or that we do, is -- blessedly -- of any consequence whatsoever from the cosmic perspective.

Epicurus (focus on happiness)

An extraordinary number of adverts focus on the three very things that Epicurus identified as false lures of happiness: romantic love, professional status and luxury.

Adverts wouldn't work as well as they do if they didn't operate with an accurate sense of what our real needs are. Yet while they excite us by evoking them, they refuse to quench them properly. Beer ads will show us groups of friends hugging -- but only sell us alcohol (that we might end up drinking alone).

Spinoza

Learning from what he didn\'t recognize: If we're ever to replace traditional beliefs, we must remember just how much religion is helped along by ritual, tradition, art and a desire to belong -- all things that Spinoza, despite his great wisdom, ignored at his peril in his bold attempt to replace the Bible.

Hegel

Learn from ideas you disklike.

Progress is not linear but messy

Satre

Things are weirder than we think

If we start to question the conventions, we take for granted. think of your job through Sartrean eyes: you and many others swathe your bodies in cloth and congregate in a large box where you make agitated sounds at one another; you press many plastic buttons with great rapidity in exchange for pieces of paper. Then you stop and go away. The next time the sky gets light, you come back.

We are free

In the course of fully realising our freedom, we will come up against what Sartre calls the 'anguish' of existence. Everything is (terrifyingly) possible because nothing has any preordained, God-given sense or purpose. Humans are just making it up as they go along and are free to cast aside the shackles at any moment. There is nothing in the non-human order of the world called 'marriage' or 'job'. These are just labels we have put on things and are -- as proper existentialists -- free to take them off again.

This is frightening, hence the term 'anguish', but Sartre sees anguish as a mark of maturity, a sign that we are fully alive and properly aware of reality, with its freedom, its possibilities and its weighty choices.

Adam Smith

Specialisation

Modern economies produce unprecedented amounts of wealth (for the elite).

Many ordinary people find work rather boring and, a key complaint, meaningless.

Consumer capitalism

The capitalism of today still hasn't quite got around to resolving the awkward choices Smith and Rousseau circled. But the hope for the future is that we won't forever merely be making money off degrading or superficial consumer needs (pumping out ever more greetings cards or sneakers). We'll also learn to generate sizeable profits from helping people in truly important, ambitious ways. Psychotherapy should, for example, rightly be one of the gargantuan industries of the later 21st century.

As a result, the reform of capitalism hinges on an odd-sounding, but critical task: the education of the consumer. We need to be taught to want better quality things and pay a proper price for them, one that reflects the true burden on workers and the environment.

A good capitalist society doesn't therefore just offer customers choice, it also spends a considerable part of its energies educating people about how to exercise this choice in judicious ways. Capitalism needs to be saved by elevating the quality of demand.

How to treat the rich

The rich accumulate money not because they are materially greedy, but because they are emotionally needy. They do so primarily in order to be liked and approved of.

This vanity provides wise governments with a highly useful tool. Rather than taxing the rich, these governments should learn to give the rich plenty of honour and status -- in return for doing all the good things that these narcissists wouldn't normally bother with, like funding schools and hospitals and paying their workers well.

Karl Marx

Capitalism makes work insecure

Capitalism makes the human being utterly expendable; just one factor among others in the forces of production and one that can ruthlessly be let go the minute that costs rise or savings can be made through technology. There simply is no job security in capitalism.

Workers don\'t control wages

capitalists shrunk the wages of the labourers as much as possible in order to skim off a wide profit margin. It was very difficult for the labourers to protest or alter their circumstances. Not only were they in desperate need of employment, but their landlords and employers could conspire to keep them desperate by raising the price of living along with any rise in wages.

Capitalism is very unstable

Going through bust and boom phases is part of the system.

Before it took almost all adults to feed a nation. Today, a developed nation needs hardly anyone to be employed in farming. Making cars needs practically no employees. Unemployment is currently dreadful and seen as a terrible ill. But, in Marx's eyes, it is a sign of success: it is the result of our unbelievable productive powers. The job of a hundred people can now be done by one machine. And yet rather than draw the positive conclusion from this, we continue to see unemployment as a curse and a failure. Yet, logically, the goal of economics should be to make more and more of us unemployed and to celebrate this fact as progress rather than as failure.

Marx\'s vision

it [is] possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.' We'd get to explore all the different parts of ourselves -- our creativity, our intellect, our gentleness, and our ferocity -- and everyone would have a bit of time to do philosophy.

John Ruskin

Why was the contemporary world so dispiritingly, monstrously ugly?

It is the duty of creative, privileged people to direct their efforts towards making the world more pleasing and tidy, more convenient and beautiful, not just for themselves, but for the greatest good of the greatest number. He also believed that we should not (cannot) leave this to the forces of the market, because they will never get round to planting wildflowers by the edges of roads and making sure that village greens are pretty.

Nature sets the standard. It provides us with particularly intense examples of beauty and grace. The plumage of a bird, the clouds over the mountains at sunset, the great trees bending in the wind -- nature is ordered, beautiful, simple, effective. It is only with us that things seem to go wrong. Why can we not be as it is? There is a humiliating contrast between the natural loveliness of trees by a stream and the bleak, griminess of an average street; between the ever-changing interest of the sky and the monotony and dreariness of so much of our lives.

Thoreau

It was not until it was picked up by subsequent reformers that 'Civil Disobedience' -- as it was later called -- became one of the most influential pieces of American political philosophy in history. Mohandas Gandhi adopted Thoreau's idea of nonviolent disobedience as a model for his fight against British colonialism.

He challenges us to be authentic not just by avoiding material life and its distractions, but by engaging with the world, and withdrawing our support for the government when we believe it is acting unjustly.

William Morris

He was acutely aware that there are some key problems which are not caused by a shortage of money and which more money won't solve. So he could never be persuaded that financial growth in and of itself could be the sure sign of improvement -- whether in an individual or a national life.

The economy is intimately tethered to our preferences and choices. And that these are open to transformation.

Morris wished for people to see their purchases as investments and buy items sparingly. He would have preferred for someone to spend £1,000 on an intricate, hand-made dining set that would last for decades and grow to become a family heirloom, than for each generation to buy its own cheap alternative, just to be thrown away when fashions changed. This way, people could take pride in and really enjoy the things they bought. There is some sense of satisfaction and pride in buying something you know will last and which can be handed down to future generations.

John Rawls

Veil of ignorance

'the veil of ignorance', and through it Rawls asks us to imagine ourselves in a conscious, intelligent state before our own birth, but without any knowledge of what circumstances we were going to be born into; our futures shrouded by a veil of ignorance. Standing high above the planet, we wouldn't know what sort of parents we'd have, what our neighbourhoods would be like, how the schools would perform, what the local hospital could do for us, how the police and judicial systems might treat us and so on ...

The question that Rawls asks us all to contemplate is: if we knew nothing about where we'd end up, what sort of a society would it feel safe to enter? In what kind of political system would it be rational and sane for us to take root -- and accept the challenge laid down by the veil of ignorance?

the 'veil of ignorance' comes in handy: it stops us thinking about all those who have done well and draws our attention to the appalling risks involved in entering US society as if it were a lottery, behind the veil of ignorance -- without knowing if you'd wind up the child of an orthodontist in Scottsdale, Arizona or as the offspring of a black single mother in the rougher bits of eastern Detroit. Would any sane birth-lottery player really want to take the gamble of ending up in the 70 per cent of people who have substandard healthcare, inadequate housing, poor access to a good legal structure and a sloppy system of education? Or would the sane gambler not insist that the rules of the entire game had to be changed to maximise the overall chances of a decent outcome for any single player?

Buddha

The first noble truth is the realisation that prompted the Buddha's journey -- that there is suffering and constant dissatisfaction in the world: 'Life is difficult and brief and bound up with suffering.'

The second is that this suffering is caused by our desires, and thus 'attachment is the root of all suffering.'

The third truth is that we can transcend suffering by removing or managing all of our attachments.

The fourth and final noble truth the Buddha uncovered is that we can learn to move beyond suffering through what he termed 'the eightfold path'. The eightfold path involves a series of aspects of behaving 'right' and wisely: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. What strikes the Western observer is the notion that wisdom is a habit, not merely an intellectual realisation. One must exercise one's nobler impulses. Understanding is only part of becoming a better person.

Lao Tzu

'The usefulness of a pot comes from its emptiness,' Lao Tzu said. 'Empty yourself of everything. Let your mind become still.'

'When I let go of what I am,' Lao Tzu wrote, 'I become what I might be.'

'The best people are like water, which benefits all things and does not compete with them. It stays in lowly places that others reject. This is why it is so similar to the Way (Dao).'

the beneficial effects of nature, still work an influence on those around it. Natural scenes have the power to suggest certain values to us -- mountains: dignity; pines: resolution; flowers: kindness -- and, in unobtrusive ways, may therefore act as inspirations to virtue.

The idea that the contemplation of nature is a source of perspective and tranquillity is well known in theory, but so easy to overlook because we take it for granted and never give it the time and focus required.

Nature does not hurry

yet everything is accomplished.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes.

Do not resist them.

That only causes sorrow.

Alexis de Tocqueville (observing democracy in America)

Tocqueville went to America: to see what the future would be like.

Democracy breeds materialism

in America, observed Tocqueville, a book that does not make money -- because it does not sell well -- cannot be good, because the test of all goodness is money. And anything that makes a profit must be admirable in every way. It was a flattened, unnuanced view that made Tocqueville see the advantages of the relatively more subtle, multipolar status systems of Europe, where one might (on a good day) be deemed good, but poor -- or rich, but vulgar.

Democracy and capitalism had created a relatively equitable, but also very flat and oppressive way for humans to judge each other.

Democracy breeds envy and shame

Though this sense of unlimited opportunity could initially encourage a surface cheerfulness, especially in young servants, and though it enabled the most talented or lucky among them to fulfil their goals

The rigid hierarchical system that had held in place in almost every Western society until the 18th century, and had denied all hope of social movement except in rare cases, was unjust in a thousand all too obvious ways, but it offered those on the lowest rungs one notable freedom: the freedom not to have to take the achievements of quite so many people in society as reference points -- and so find themselves severely wanting in status and importance as a result.

Tyranny of the majority

Democratic culture, he thought, could easily end up demonising any assertion of difference, and especially of cultural superiority or high mindedness, which could be perceived as offensive to the majority -- even though such attitudes might be connected with real merit.

Democracy turns us against authority

Max Weber

But Weber proposed that what made capitalism possible was a set of ideas, not scientific discoveries -- and in particular religious ideas.

• Religion makes capitalism happen

• Protestantism makes you feel guilty all the time:

• God likes hard work

• All work is holy

• Community counts not the family

Today, Weber would counsel those who wish to spread capitalism to concentrate on our equivalent of religion: culture. It is a nation's attitudes, hopes and sense of what life is about that produces an economy that either flourishes or flounders. The path to reforming an economy shouldn't therefore wind through material aid, it should go through cultural assistance.

Why is capitalism not going so well in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the poorest country on earth)?

Because, Weber would tell us, this unfortunate nation has the wrong mentality, one far removed from that of Rhineland Germany. They believe in clans, they have magical thinking, they don't believe that God would Himself command them to be an honest mechanic or hairdresser ...

Margaret Mead

Mead also discovered that human behaviour in relation to gender varied widely from culture to culture, far more than Americans at the time could imagine. For example, Americans thought of men as productive, sensible, and more aggressive, while women were more frivolous, peaceful, and nurturing. But in her 1935 book, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, Mead studied tribes in Papua New Guinea and found radically different results. She recorded that in the Arapesh tribe both men and women were peaceful and nurturing, while among Mundugumor, men and women were both ruthless and aggressive. Perhaps most striking was Mead's description of the people of the Chambri region, where the women were dominant and far more aggressive than men, while the men were dependents and in need of emotional support. In short, Mead suggested that none of these traits were 'human nature': they were all instead simply possibilities, which were either taught, encouraged, or shunned by native culture.

Mead's striking conclusion was, of course, that culture determined an individual's personality far more than people had previously expected.

Rachel Carson

It is perhaps her most radical idea of all: that it is love, rather than guilt, which is the key to transforming humanity's relationship to nature.

Sigmund Freud

His professional life was not an immediate success. As a young medical student, he dissected hundreds of male eels in a vain attempt to locate their reproductive organs, and ultimately failed to publish on the topic. He then turned his attention to a new, exciting anaesthetic drug, trumpeting its amazing properties. But unfortunately cocaine turned out to be dangerous and addictive, and Freud had to stop advocating its medical use.

He could be very jealous of his colleagues. He once fainted watching Carl Jung give a talk, and he forbade nearly all his students from even seeing Alfred Adler. He was convinced he would die between 61 and 62 and had great phobias about those numbers. He once panicked during a stay in Athens when his hotel room number was 31, half of 62. He soothed himself with his beloved cigar, but he was also very self-conscious about it, because he thought it was a replacement for his earlier mastubatory habits.