A blueprint for disaster in any society is when the elite are capable of insulating themselves.
Interpretation
When the elite distance themselves from the struggles of the ordinary people, it can lead to societal problems.
Jared Diamond's quote suggests that a society is at risk of failure when its elite class creates barriers that separate themselves from the rest of the population. This insulation fosters inequality and disconnect, preventing a shared understanding of challenges faced by the broader community, ultimately leading to social unrest and potential disaster.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about social justice at a community meeting.
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.
We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.
Your faith will not fail while God sustains it; you are not strong enough to fall away while God is resolved to hold you.
Communism everywhere has paid the price of rigidity and dogmatism. Freedom has the strength of compassion and flexibility. It has, above all, the strength of intellectual honesty.
Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.
Even my desire to become free or enlightened is just another craving for fulfillment or completion in the future. So don’t seek to become free or desire or “achieve” enlightenment. Become present.
Now there have been delivered to us in the Gospel three Persons and names through whom the generation or birth of believers takes place, and he who is begotten by this Trinity is equally begotten of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost —for thus does the Gospel speak of the Spirit, that “that which is born of Spirit is spirit,” and it is “in Christ “that Paul begets, and the Father is the “Father of all”.
As a man, casting off worn out garments taketh new ones, so the dweller in the body, entereth into ones that are new.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.