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Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Eleanor Roosevelt

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Bono, on Entrepreneurial Capitalism

Excerpt from The New York Times — Bono Is Still Trying to Figure Out U2 and Himself

NYT: Hearing you say that U2 can still make a song famous but probably can’t still have a hit indicates a certain level of self-awareness. I’m curious about whether you’re similarly self-aware about how your activism is seen by some. Maybe this is too much of straw-man argument, but it’s easy to imagine a young activist looking through the book and seeing praise for George W. Bush and Bill Clinton — not exactly beloved figures these days — and thinking you’re out of touch. Or reading a sentence like “Why is there hunger in a world of surplus?” and wondering whether you ever asked that question to all the billionaires you write about glowingly. So do you give credence to shifting ideas about activism and change in the same way that you give credence to shifting ideas about the pop world?

Bono: It is a fair question. Systemic change is required, but I get one eyebrow up when people want systemic change but don’t want to bother to turn up for the town-hall meeting. I’ve met a few of them. You know, I smuggled some tapes out of the Genoa G8 meeting, where the anti-globalization protesters were getting the shite kicked out of them. They were smashed up and came to me and asked me to smuggle out some tapes. I did, and when I got the tapes back to the people, I sat down and said: “Look, what are you doing here? What are we going to do?” And they were like: “We’re anarchists, dude. We’re not into that shit.” I said: “Is it just that this stuff’s too boring for you? Can we find a model?” You still have to vote and get organized. I ended up as an activist in a very different place from where I started. I thought that if we just redistributed resources, then we could solve every problem. I now know that’s not true. There’s a funny moment when you realize that as an activist: The off-ramp out of extreme poverty is, ugh, commerce, it’s entrepreneurial capitalism. I spend a lot of time in countries all over Africa, and they’re like, Eh, we wouldn’t mind a little more globalization actually. I would point out that there has been a lot of progress over the years. If you read Thomas Piketty, whom you also interviewed, his whole thing is that in 200 years incredible progress has been made.

NYT: Isn’t citing Thomas Piketty a little dicey for you, given what he says about fairer taxation?

Bono: Yes, he has a system of progressive taxation and I get it, but the question that I’m compelled to answer is: How are things going for the bottom billion? Be careful to placard the poorest of the poor on politics when they are fighting for their lives. It’s very easy to become patronizing. Capitalism is a wild beast. We need to tame it. But globalization has brought more people out of poverty than any other -ism. If somebody comes to me with a better idea, I’ll sign up. I didn’t grow up to like the idea that we’ve made heroes out of businesspeople, but if you’re bringing jobs to a community and treating people well, then you are a hero. That’s where I’ve ended up. God spare us from lyricists who quote themselves, but if I wrote only one lyric that was any good, it might have been: Choose your enemies carefully because they will define you. Turning the establishment into the enemy — it’s a little easy, isn’t it?

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Midwest Amnesia

from What Does It Mean to Be Midwestern? by Amy Haimerl

Q: The Midwest is this amorphous concept. How do you describe it?

A: “If there are a set of characteristically Midwestern American traits, one of them is amnesia. There’s actually cool shit happening, but nobody talks about it or remembers it. One of the first things that surprised me in my research is that the Midwest has been constantly talked about throughout American history, but it just never sticks and becomes this kind of narrative that people remember. There’s this sense that the Midwest is here to be forged again and historicized for the first time. But along with that sense of newness, is a sense of, like, a disappointed place, a place that almost happened. There is a melancholy that feels very particular to this region.“

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We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot, from Little Gidding

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His highest ideal was at first to die gloriously for something; now his ideal is the supreme one: to live humbly for something.

Wilhelm Stekel. (Referenced by J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye)

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The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller. The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger. Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world. It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to lose them.

GK Chesterton

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A Plan Is Not a Strategy. Such a simple but powerful reminder from Roger Martin.

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This is really good. I experienced a lot of this building Bloomscape.

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The world is more malleable than you think; reality is what you can get away with.

Bono in The Observer, commenting on the early days when they barely knew how to play.

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There is also the question of depth: we may have taken a certain path, both only half-heartedly, without conviction, sacrifice, bravery, or sincerity. The underlying depth below our surface approach waits for us like an invitation and a reproach, an ocean seen from a cliff: another life, informing this life. On the one hand, a spur to boldness and a deeper participation when we realize how much in this life the other life breathes, or on the other, if distanced into the abstract, a source of shame, a life un-braved, un-lived, misunderstood, no matter how much of it whispered conspiratorially in our ears. A parallel life we never fully invited into our own.

David Whyte, Parallels in Consolations

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The reason I think invention is so very important today is that young people are passionate about saving the planet, improving the environment, and finding cures for life threatening diseases. I happen to believe that all these problems can be solved by the diligent application of research and development. I would love to see more school children and university students motivated to become engineers and scientists to make the breakthroughs that they so want to happen. We should be encouraging the young to become doers rather than virtue signalers, to help them strive to solve the problems of their age while looking forward to a better future.

James Dyson, in Invention: A Life (audio version)

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Most organizations (and most people) do too much and accomplish too little. We often fail to clarify our intentions, and then to unify and align our resources. We fail to capture the equity in our action; we end up producing more noise than signal.

Bruce Mau, MC24

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Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Henry David Thoreau

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Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

Winston Churchill

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It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Teddy Roosevelt, via Brene Brown

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