If Churchill tweeted, we’d be reading very different tweets from those we read from the president and other political leaders today. I don’t suggest what he would say. No one can know that. But I do know how he would go about it — and I suggest that his methods offer an excellent example for today’s leaders.
.. First, Churchill avoided repaying vilification in kind. Instead he used humor, irony, plays on words. This lowered the temperature and took the sting out of debate.
.. Blunting insults with humor let Churchill off the hook. In the ensuing laughter, people forgot that he’d never responded to the accusation. “I have to measure the length of the response to any question by the worth, meaning, and significance of that question,” he said to an angry inquisitor — which avoided any answer at all.
.. Second, Churchill rarely attacked someone personally in public, though he didn’t hesitate to lampoon their well-known traits. During a loquacious speech by an MP who questioned his veracity, judgment, and even morals, Churchill interrupted: “I can well understand the honorable member speaking for practice, which he badly needs.”
.. in avoiding jibes, he did not even defend himself. The defense would come later, in a carefully worded statement at a time of his choosing. This was much more gratifying than outbursts in the Twitterverse.
.. Third, Churchill would often use interesting allegories or images rather than vicious barbs when confronted by opponents.
.. Lastly — and perhaps most important — even though the political divide was as wide in his time as in ours, Churchill fostered respect and collegiality. Intrinsic to his methods was an underlying respect for opponents. To him they were not enemies, merely honorable people who were mistaken.
A Fountain Fullness of Love
Bonaventure taught that there are three books from which we learn wisdom: The Book of Creation, The Book of Jesus and Scripture, and The Book of Experience. He also taught that there are three pairs of eyes. The first pair sees all things as a fingerprint or footprint of God (vestigia Dei), which evokes foundational respect and teachability. The second pair of eyes is the hard work of honest self-knowledge—awareness of how you are processing your reality moment by moment. This is necessary to keep your own lens clean and open, and it is the work of your entire lifetime. The third pair is the eyes of contemplation, which allow you to see things in their essence and in their core meaning. Only then can you receive the transmitted image of God on your soul.
.. Bonaventure says we must begin “at the bottom, presenting to ourselves the whole material world as a mirror through which we may pass over to God, the Supreme [Artisan].”
.. Everything comes from God, exemplifies God, and then returns to God. Bonaventure says that sums up all his teaching.
Once You Are in an Authority Position in any Institution, Your Job is to Preserve That Institution
Francis knew that once you are in an authority position in any institution, your job is to preserve that institution, and your freedom to live and speak the full truth becomes limited.
.. The early Franciscans said the first Bible was not the written Bible, but creation itself, the cosmos.
.. The job of religion and theology is to help us look in the mirror that is already present. All this “mirroring” eventually effects a complete change in consciousness.
How “Silicon Valley” Nails Silicon Valley
“Silicon Valley,” now in its third season, is one of the funniest shows on television; it is also the first ambitious satire of any form to shed much light on the current socio-cultural moment in Northern California.
.. “In the writer’s room, I talked a lot about how the founder of a company has a moral authority that no other C.E.O., no matter how accomplished, will ever have,” Costolo told me.
.. “That’s the first thing you notice,” Judge said. “It’s capitalism shrouded in the fake hippie rhetoric of ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ because it’s uncool to just say ‘Hey, we’re crushing it and making money.’”
.. “If someone is holding a document on the show, that document is written out, in full, the way that it would be in real life,” Dotan said. “We don’t think of it in terms of, ‘How little can we get away with showing on camera?’ It’s more, like, ‘Let’s go through the process of making the world as complete as possible and see if that process leads us to better stuff.’ Which it usually does.”
.. His answer was, ‘I think Silicon Valley is immersed in a titanic battle between the hippie value system of the Steve Jobs generation and the Ayn Randian libertarian values of the Peter Thiel generation.’
.. “Some of us actually, as naïve as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place. And we did not succeed. We made some things better, we made some things worse, and in the meantime the libertarians took over, and they do not give a damn about right or wrong. They are here to make money.”
.. By satirizing them, you’re holding up a mirror. Some of these guys look in the mirror and go, ‘Fuck, we look silly.’ Others look in the mirror and go, ‘Wow, I am so fucking handsome.’”
.. “The more I meet these people and learn about them, the more I come away thinking that, despite all the bullshit and greed, there actually is something exciting and hopeful going on up there.”
.. “I think it’s a combination of the pretentiousness of the people involved and their total market penetration,” O’Keefe said. “It’s no longer necessary to tell you what the product is. Now the goal is just to make you feel better about using it.”