German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel used the term Geist (Spirit or Mind) to describe the totality of human consciousness, culture, and reality. Rather than a static entity, Spirit is an active, dynamic process. It evolves through history via a dialectical “plumbing” system of constant challenge, alienation, and ultimate reconciliation. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Hegel’s mapping of the Spirit—most famously detailed in his seminal 1807 text, the Phenomenology of Spirit—operates through a very specific dynamic of development: [1, 2, 3, 4]
The Dialectical Flow: Spirit evolves in a rhythm of Thesis (a foundational idea), Antithesis (a contradictory limitation), and Synthesis (a higher, more inclusive truth that resolves the conflict).
The Medium of Self-Discovery: Spirit is not separate from the world; it is the fundamental reality shaping it. However, to truly know itself, Spirit must project itself into the world, experience alienation from it, and eventually recognize that the “other” is actually just a reflection of itself.
The “We” is “I”: Spirit does not achieve absolute self-awareness in isolated contemplation. It is fully realized through collective human interaction, societal institutions, culture, and shared history, where the individual consciousness (I) realizes it is part of a universal social whole (We). [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
You can dive into Hegel’s step-by-step breakdown of how consciousness journeys from basic sensory perception to absolute knowledge in the Wikipedia Entry on the Phenomenology of Spirit.
We’ve got our mind on our money and our money on our mind. And while we’re mulling over all this moolah, we’re also thinking about the many words we use to refer to cash. Don’t believe us? We’ll put our money where our mouth is and show you all the words we could find. (And best of all, it won’t cost you a dime! … Feeling lucky yet?)
cash
The English word cash was first recorded in the late 1500s and comes through the French casse (“case, box”) from the Latin capsa (“case” or “coffer”), which both refer to things you keep money in.
green
In the US, money is often referred to as greenor the green because paper bills are—wait for it—green!
greenbacks
The slang greenbacks for US paper bills dates back to the Civil War when the government began using green ink on the reverse side of banknotes to attempt to thwart counterfeiters.
lettuce and cabbage
These two vegan-friendly words for money date all the way back to the early 1900s and yet again reference the green color of dollar bills.
coin
The slang coin is used in both the United States and the United Kingdom to refer generally to money, and not just the varieties of metal coins that have been used as currency for thousands of years.
bills
Dollar bills have been issued by the US government since 1862, but the slangbillis often used to specifically mean $100.
cheddar
There are several theories as to why the cheesy slang cheddar is used to refer to money. According to the most popular theory, cheddar referred to government cheese found in welfare packages. From there, it was used to refer to money (i.e., benefits) from the government rather than the cheese.
scratch
The American slangscratchfor money can be traced back to 1914, but nobody knows why this itchy word was first used to refer to cash.
bank
The term bank has been used to refer to money—and not just the place we keep it—since the 1500s. Its use to indicate a large sum of money can be traced back to at least the 1990s.
bread
The word bread has been used as American slang for money since at least the 1930s. Food is among the most important reasons people need money, and the slang bread likely refers to the fact that bread is one of the most commonly eaten (and purchased) foods.
dough
Interestingly, the slangdough for money predates the slang bread, as it has been used in this sense since at least the 1830s. However, it is commonly thought that using dough for money is related to the use of bread as “livelihood” (“to earn one’s bread”) that has been attested since the 1700s.
bacon
The wordbacon is used to refer to money or wealth in phrases such as bring home the bacon. This phrase has been recorded since 1924, and it is widely believed to refer to a game played at county fairs in which a person would be awarded a greased pig if they could successfully catch it.
Benjamin Franklin has been on the $100 bill since 1914, and the slang Benjamins for $100 bills obviously references this fact. Less commonly, other dollar bills may also be referred to by the people depicted on them, such as Washingtons, Lincolns, Hamiltons, and Jacksons.
moolah
The slang moolah has been used to refer to money since at least 1936, but it is another word with unknown origins.
big ones
The phrase big ones is used both in the US and UK to refer to dollar bills/pounds or to large amounts of money such as a thousand dollars/pounds or a million dollars/pounds. Big ones has been used in this sense since at least 1863.
bucks
The word buck has been used as American slang for a dollar since at least 1856. It is possible the word buck refers to the deerskins that were used as currency in the 1700s.
fiver and tenner
The slang words fiverandtenner are used in the US and UK to refer to five dollars/pounds and ten dollars/pounds, and it seems likely that they have been ever since these bills have been in circulation.
cha-ching
The words cha-ching, ka-ching, or ker-ching have been used to refer to money since at least 1969. They’re onomatopoeic expressions based on the sound of a cash register.
simoleons
The word simoleon has been used as US slang for a dollar since the 1880s, and it is yet another word with an unknown origin—though it’s possible the word is a blend of Simon and Napoleon.
shekels
The word shekels can be traced back to at least the 1820s, and it is clearly based on the shekel (sheqel in Hebrew) coins used by the Hebrews, Babylonians, and Phoenicians during Biblical times. The currency of Israel is also known as the New Israel Shekel or shekel, for short.
chump change
The phrase chump change to refer to a small amount of money emerged from Black slang during the 1960s.
Monopoly money
The slang phrase Monopoly money is often used to refer to small amounts of money or something that is worthless. Obviously, the phrase references the fake paper money used in the popular(ly infuriating) board game Monopoly.
bones
The slang bone has been used to mean a dollar since at least 1889, and it is another slang term with unclear origins.
K
The letter K is used as shorthand to mean a thousand dollars; if someone has 50K, they have $50,000. A K represents the Greek prefix kilo-, which is used in many words that refer to a thousand of something.
grand
The word grand is used in US and UK slang to mean a thousand dollars or a thousand pounds. There are several theories where this term came from, including the possibility that it refers to $1,000 being a grand (“large”) sum of money.
C-note
The slang C-note refers to a $100 bill, and the letter C refers to the Roman numeral for 100 that was printed on early $100 banknotes.
clams
Beginning a run of old-timey slang that would have been popular among 1920s bootlegging gangsters, the word clam was probably used as a term for a dollar based on the practices of using shells as currency seen in ancient societies and some Native American tribes.
ducats or duckets
The slang ducats or duckets is based on the gold coins and silver coins of the same name that were once used in parts of Europe.
smackers and smackeroos
Smackers has been used to refer to money since the 1920s, and the sillier smackeroos(or smackarolas, smackeroonies, smackerolas, smackeroonyos, and smackolas) emerged in the 1940s. While we don’t know for sure, it is possible that the term references “smacking” dollar bills into someone’s hand.
large
The slang large, meaning a thousand dollars, likely comes from the fact that thousands of dollars would be a large amount of money for most people.
spondulix
The slang word spondulix (and its many spelling variations: spondees, spondles, spondools, spondooli, spondooliks, and spondulix) is unfortunately another one whose origin we simply do not know.
dead presidents
Returning to modern times, we’re looking at the term dead presidents. While most denominations of US paper money do feature images of dead presidents on them, dollar bills also feature influential people who were never president, such as Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton.
stacks
Stacks, or fat stacks, refers to towering stacks a person would have if they were rich. A stack can also mean specifically $1K or $10K.
paper
Unlike most paper, US paper money is made out of cotton and linen rather than the wood pulp used in paper you can buy at the store.
bands
The slang bands references the currency bands that people and banks can use to store and transport large amounts of dollar bills.
rack
The slang rack means a thousand dollars and was popularized by rapper Yung Chris in his 2011 song “Racks.”
fetti
Fetti is said to have emerged from Black slang in the Bay Area and, according to popular theory, comes from feria, a Spanish slang word for money.
guap
The slang guap has been used in rap music since the 2000s, but nobody is exactly sure where this word originally came from.
skrilla or scrilla
Skrilla, also spelled scrilla, has been used in rap music since the 1990s, but it is another word whose exact origin is unclear.
From K-pop to Korean dramas, learn some key words so you can stay on top of the “Korean Wave.”
lucci
Lucci is another slang word that can be found in 1990s rap music. A common theory suggests it is based on the word lucre.
C.R.E.A.M.
The acronym C.R.E.A.M., which stands for “Cash Rules Everything Around Me,” was created by the hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan in their 1994 song “C.R.E.A.M.” In an interview, Raekwon the Chef revealed that the slang cream for money was invented by children from his neighborhood and was inspired by, of all things, Tom and Jerry cartoons.
Gouda
The slang Gouda for money was popularized by rapper E-40, who is known for his creative wordplay. According to E-40, Gouda was inspired by the older terms cheese and cheddar and—he admits—the credit for using this specific type of cheese really belongs to his wife.
dosh
Among Brits, dosh is a popular slang term for money, and it can be traced back to the 1950s. Sadly, it is another word with an unknown origin.
quid
The slang quid is used by Brits, Australians, and New Zealanders to refer to a pound sterling or an Australian pound. Quid is recorded back to the 1600s and possibly comes from the Latin quid used in phrases such as quid pro quo.
Australian slang
Australians use some fun slang words to refer to their colorful paper money. Some of these terms include prawn for the pink five dollar bill, blue swimmer for the blue 10, lobster for the red 20, and pineapple for the yellow 50.
When one of the world’s leading neuroscientists starts sounding like a mystic, something important is shifting in how we understand what it means to be human…
I read the news from a recent symposium in Porto twice, and then I sat with it for a long while looking out at the trees in front of my office. Christof Koch, one of the most respected neuroscientists alive, the man who literally helped invent the modern science of consciousness alongside Francis Crick back in the 1990s, was telling a roomful of his colleagues that he’s no longer convinced the brain creates consciousness at all.
He thinks consciousness might be a fundamental feature of reality itself, the way mass and electromagnetism and gravity are. The brain doesn’t generate awareness so much as receive, shape, and channel it. Coming from Koch, who runs the Allen Institute for Brain Science and spent his whole career trying to find the neural correlates of consciousness, that’s a tectonic shift.
For me it landed more like a homecoming than a surprise. I spent long stretches of my younger life walking a forest path in Stadtsteinach, in northern Bavaria, with my old friend and teacher Gottfried Müller. I wrote a whole book about him called The Prophet’s Way, named after that forest trail.
Things happened on those walks that I’ve never been able to explain to a materialist’s satisfaction. Herr Müller would know what I was about to say before I said it. Animals would behave around him in ways I’d never seen animals behave around any other person. There were moments when the boundary between his mind and mine, and between both of us and the woods we were walking through, felt less like a wall and more like a screen door. You could feel things passing through.
For years I tried to talk myself out of those experiences. I’d been raised in the post-war American faith that the brain is a meat computer and that anything that looks like soul or telepathy or awareness-without-a-body is either a glitch in the wiring or a story we tell ourselves so we’ll be less afraid of dying.
That’s still the official position of most of the scientific establishment. It’s called materialism, or physicalism, and for the last hundred or so years it’s been treated less like a hypothesis than like the air the room is made of.
Koch’s whole point in Porto is that the air may not actually be there. He laid out three places where the materialist story breaks down.
The first is the so-called hard problem of consciousness, named by the philosopher David Chalmers in 1995. Even if we could map every single neuron firing in your visual cortex when you see the color red, we still have no idea why there’s something it’s like to see red. Information processing alone doesn’t explain the inside view.
The second is modern physics, where the deeper anyone digs, into quantum mechanics, the measurement problem, the role of the observer, the harder it gets to defend the picture of solid stuff bumping around in empty space.
And the third is what Koch politely calls anomalous experiences: near-death experiences, mystical states, and a phenomenon called terminal lucidity, where dementia patients sometimes wake up hours before death, recognize their families, speak in full sentences, and say goodbye, with a brain that on autopsy is far too damaged to be doing any of those things.
None of that fits the meat-computer model. And there are are now far too many cases to wave away.
So what does Koch propose instead? He says it may be time to revisit some old, supposedly-discarded ideas: idealism, which holds that mind is fundamental and matter emerges from it, and panpsychism, which holds that consciousness, in some form, goes all the way down.
He champions a particular framework called Integrated Information Theory, which says that any system integrating information at a high enough level (a brain, an octopus, a forest, perhaps even a galaxy) has some form of inner experience.
You and I have a lot of it. A worm has a little. A pile of sand probably has none. The line between conscious and not conscious stops being a wall between humans and everything else, and starts being a gradient that runs through all of nature.
This is the part where my lifelong reading list lights up. Aldous Huxley argued in The Doors of Perception in 1954 that the brain is a “reducing valve,” a filter that narrows the firehose of cosmic consciousness down to the trickle a primate body can survive on. The French philosopher Henri Bergson made essentially the same argument fifty years before Huxley, in Matter and Memory.
William James, the founder of American psychology, proposed in 1898 that the brain might be a transmissive organ rather than a productive one, the way a radio is a transmissive instrument for music it doesn’t generate.
And my late friend Joseph Chilton Pearce, in books like The Crack in the Cosmic Egg and The Biology of Transcendence (I wrote the foreword to Crack, and was lucky enough to spend many evenings sitting with Joe before he died) kept making the case that human awareness isn’t something the skull manufactures, it’s something the skull-and-heart together tune into.
None of those people were considered scientists in good standing. Most got dismissed as poets or mystics or romantics. And now here’s Christof Koch, in 2026, telling a room full of his fellow neuroscientists that they may have been right all along.
It matters that this is happening now. We’re in a moment when artificial intelligence is suddenly forcing everyone to ask, out loud and a little nervously, what consciousness even is, and whether a sufficiently complicated machine might have some.
That question can’t be answered until we have an honest theory of consciousness in the first place, and the materialist theory we inherited from the nineteenth century isn’t up to the job. So the door is opening. The wisdom traditions, the ones we used to call primitive or premodern, get to walk back in.
What does any of this have to do with how you live tomorrow morning? Quite a lot, actually. If consciousness is something you participate in rather than something your brain secretes like bile, then attention is sacred.
The hours you spend doomscrolling are hours of awareness leaked back into a feed that doesn’t love you. The minutes you spend in silence, in nature, in a real conversation with another human being where both of you put your phones face-down on the table, are minutes when something fundamental in the universe gets to come awake through you.
The contemplative traditions, every one of them, have been telling us this for thousands of years. Sit. Breathe. Pay attention. The Buddhists call it mindfulness. The Christians call it contemplative prayer. Indigenous peoples call it being on the land. They aren’t different practices. They’re the same practice in different vocabularies.
And if Koch is right, the materialism that’s been quietly running our civilization since Descartes, the assumption that nature is dead matter to be managed and that mind is a fluke of biology, is wrong in a way that has consequences. It’s the philosophical engine room of strip-mining and factory farming and treating each other like consumer units.
If consciousness is woven into the fabric of things, then the river really is a relative, the forest really is a community, and the person across from you really is, at some level, made of the same inwardness you’re made of. That’s not poetry. That’s what the math is starting to say, and Native people have been trying to tell us for centuries.
I’d love to know what you think. If you’ve ever had an experience that didn’t fit the meat-computer story, a moment of inexplicable knowing, a presence you couldn’t account for, a goodbye from someone whose brain shouldn’t have been working, please share it in the comments.
The wisdom traditions kept this data safe for thousands of years by people swapping these stories around fires. We can do the same thing in this corner of Substack. And if you haven’t yet read Huxley or William James or Joe Pearce on this question, do yourself the favor. The future of science may turn out to look a lot like the deepest parts of the past.
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San Francisco Symphony Mar 19, 2020 American composer Charles Ives created his Holidays Symphony as a haunting sonic portrait of New England at the turn of the 20th century, at turns sentimental and chaotic. Michael Tilson Thomas explores the riddle of Ives the loyal son and businessman versus Ives the musical maverick who made listeners confront their understanding of what music could be. Filmed on location in New England and New York City.
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove May 18, 2026 Psychology and Psychotherapy Betty J. Kovács, PhD, taught symbolic/mythic language for twenty-five years. She has served as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Jung Society of Claremont, California, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of Forever Family Foundation. Dr. Kovacs is author of Merchants of Light: The Consciousness That Is Changing the World, winner of The Scientific and Medical Network 2019 Book Prize and a Nautilus Silver Award. She has also written The Miracle of Death: There Is Nothing But Life. In this 2020 video, she explains that the Mundus Imaginalis is a layer of reality that exists between the pure, formless world of spirit and the physical world of our senses. It consists of archetypes, dreams, and symbols. Its manifestations are evident in the earliest cultural remnants, such as cave paintings. This imaginal world is far more real and different than fantasies and imagination. It speaks to us in the preconceptual language of our soul. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on December 23, 2020)
I was a latecomer to poetry, curling my nose at it in that confounding and rather embarrassing way we have of discounting what we don’t understand, dismissing as useless what we don’t know how to use. And then I met Emily Levine. Across the aisle on a transatlantic flight, across our half century of age difference, we became instant and abiding friends.
Emily Levine (Portrait by John Keatley)
Intellectually dazzling, creatively mischievous, and ecstatically funny, Emily took it upon herself to open my world to poetry, reading me a poem a day, peppering with poems our rapturously roaming conversations about semiotics and the singularity, the physics of flight and the evolution of flowers, Hannah Arendt and The Beatles, until I came to love poetry and, eventually, to write it. Emily is the reason The Universe in Verse exists.
When she was dying — which she did with such vivifying reverence for reality — we began taking long weekends by the ocean, reading poetry and talking about the meaning of life. The poems she brought were always a revelation, down to the very last one, which became a lifelong favorite I revisit whenever I lose perspective.
But it was the first poem Emily ever read to me, to break me in, that stands as eternal testament to her spirit, to the playfulness with which she approached even the most poignant aspects of this life.
Marianne Moore (Photograph: George Platt Lynes)
Marianne Moore (November 15, 1887–February 5, 1972) was in her early thirties and the world had just come undone by its first global war when, reckoning with the eternal question of what the point of art is in these matters of life and death, she composed this perfect poem — a vindication, a consecration, and, perhaps above all, an invitation:
POETRY by Marianne Moore
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us — that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—
ball fan, the statistician — case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination” — above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion —
Along the way of life, I have discovered three things you can almost always do in your darkest hour that almost never fail to recover the light:
Learn something.
Help someone.
Feel it all.
We need our sciences to learn how the universe works, to know what we don’t yet know and to comprehend it. We need our arts to learn how the heart works, to feel what we are unwilling or unable to feel and hold it without apprehension. We need both — knowledge and feeling, intelligent comprehension and emotional intelligence — to be capable of empathy, as well as self-compassion.
The damage of our time is that it pragmatizes everything, reducing the wonder of curiosity to the practical application of discoveries, reducing the symphony of feeling to the hold music of self-help, reducing human beings to data points in a log of user statistics and political polls. It is not only an insult but a violence to our humanity, the only antidote to which is a passionate defense of the irreducible things that make us human — those things useless as moonlight, unnecessary as music, as love: There is no practical value to apprehending the magnificent eye of the scallop or the mystery of the ghost pipe, no practical value to Leaves of Grass, yet these are the things that mediate the worst propensities of our kind — our capacity for despair, which is the price of consciousness, and our capacity for war, which is the cost of despair.
A century ago, as the world was recovering from its first global war, Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) foresaw another unless humanity could find a way to resist this dehumanizing cult of utility. We didn’t then, but maybe, just maybe, we can now with the prescription Russell offers in his wonderful essay “‘Useless Knowledge,’” later included in the altogether revelatory collection In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (public library).
Bertrand Russell
Observing that the Renaissance was so transformative because its “main motive” was delight — “the restoration of a certain richness and freedom in art and speculation which had been lost while ignorance and superstition kept the mind’s eye in blinkers” — and that the Enlightenment was so transformative because it probed the workings of the universe without expectation of practical gain, he writes:
Throughout the last hundred and fifty years, men have questioned more and more vigorously the value of “useless” knowledge, and have come increasingly to believe that the only knowledge worth having is that which is applicable to some part of the economic life of the community… Knowledge, everywhere, is coming to be regarded not as a good in itself, or as a means of creating a broad and humane outlook on life in general, but as merely an ingredient in technical skill… This is part and parcel of the same movement which has led to compulsory military service, boy scouts, the organisation of political parties, and the dissemination of political passion by the Press.
We do not like to think of anyone lazily enjoying life, however refined may be the quality of his enjoyment. We feel that everybody ought to be doing something to help on the great cause (whatever it may be), the more so as so many bad men are working against it and ought to be stopped. We have not leisure of mind, therefore, to acquire any knowledge except such as will help us in the fight for whatever it may happen to be that we think important.
But while the usefulness of “useful” knowledge in making the modern world cannot be denied — here we are, with our computers and airplanes and ever-growing life-expectancies — we need its “useless” counterpart to make life not longer, not more productive, but wider and deeper and more present. Russell writes:
There is indirect utility, of various different kinds, in the possession of knowledge which does not contribute to technical efficiency. I think some of the worst features of the modern world could be improved by a greater encouragement of such knowledge and a less ruthless pursuit of mere professional competence… When conscious activity is wholly concentrated on some one definite purpose, the ultimate result, for most people, is lack of balance accompanied by some form of nervous disorder… Narrowness of outlook has caused oblivion of some powerful counteracting force.
Several years before the Dutch art historian Johan Huizinga composed his revelatory treatise on how play made us human, Russell adds:
Men as well as children have need of play, that is to say, of periods of activity having no purpose beyond present enjoyment. But if play is to serve its purpose, it must be possible to find pleasure and interest in matters not connected with work.
And yet play is an active rather than passive form of leisure. In a prophetic sentiment anticipating the menacing mesmerism of social media, the way it would turn the human animal into a screen zombie, he observes:
The amusements of modern urban populations tend more and more to be passive and collective, and to consist of inactive observation of the skilled activities of others… If a leisured population is to be happy, it must be an educated population, and must be educated with a view to mental enjoyment as well as to the direct usefulness of technical knowledge.
Half a lifetime before he looked back to reflect on the key to growing old contentedly — “make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life” — he writes:
[Such useless] knowledge, when it is successfully assimilated, forms the character of a man’s thoughts and desires, making them concern themselves, in part at least, with large impersonal objects, not only with matters of immediate importance to himself. It has been too readily assumed that, when a man has acquired certain capacities by means of knowledge, he will use them in ways that are socially beneficial. The narrowly utilitarian conception of education ignores the necessity of training a man’s purposes as well as his skill… It must be admitted that highly educated people are sometimes cruel, I think there can be no doubt that they are less often so than people whose minds have lain fallow. The bully in a school is seldom a boy whose proficiency in learning is up to the average. When a lynching takes place, the ring-leaders are almost invariably very ignorant men. This is not because mental cultivation produces positive humanitarian feelings, though it may do so; it is rather because it gives other interests than the ill-treatment of neighbours, and other sources of self-respect than the assertion of domination.
Even Bertrand Russell did not foresee that within a century bullies and lynchers with fallow minds would take the reins of superpowers, waging wars by whims and feeding the fragile ego’s lust for power by terrorizing the powerless. But he did give us, as plainly and precisely as possible, a prescription for prevention:
Perhaps the most important advantage of “useless” knowledge is that it promotes a contemplative habit of mind. There is in the world too much readiness, not only for action without adequate previous reflection, but also for some sort of action on occasions on which wisdom would counsel inaction… Hamlet is held up as an awful warning against thought without action, but no one holds up Othello as a warning against action without thought… For my part, I think action is best when it emerges from a profound apprehension of the universe and human destiny, not from some wildly passionate impulse of romantic but disproportioned self-assertion. A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than in action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power, a means of preserving serenity in misfortune and peace of mind among worries.
Describing what Iris Murdoch would later term “unselfing,” which she identified as the chief reward of engaging with art and nature, he adds:
A life confined to what is personal is likely, sooner or later, to become unbearably painful; it is only by windows into a larger and less fretful cosmos that the more tragic parts of life become endurable.
These contemplative acts of unselfing, Russell notes, have “advantages ranging from the most trivial to the most profound, [from] minor vexations, such as fleas, missing trains, or cantankerous business associates [to] the difficulty of securing international co-operation.” In passage evocative of physicist Richard Feynman’s classic Ode to a Flower, he reflects:
Curious learning not only makes unpleasant things less unpleasant, but also makes pleasant things more pleasant. I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of the Han dynasty; that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kaniska introduced them into India, whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word “apricot” is derived from the same Latin source as the word “precocious,” because the apricot ripens early; and that the A at the beginning was added by mistake, owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter.
[…]
But while the trivial pleasures of culture have their place as a relief from the trivial worries of practical life, the more important merits of contemplation are in relation to the greater evils of life, death and pain and cruelty, and the blind march of nations into unnecessary disaster. For those to whom dogmatic religion can no longer bring comfort, there is need of some substitute, if life is not to become dusty and harsh and filled with trivial self-assertion.
In a passage of overwhelming prescience, he adds:
The world at present is full of angry self-centred groups, each incapable of viewing human life as a whole, each willing to destroy civilisation rather than yield an inch. To this narrowness no amount of technical instruction will provide an antidote. The antidote, in so far as it is a matter of individual psychology, is to be found in history, biology, astronomy, and all those studies which, without destroying self-respect, enable the individual to see himself in his proper perspective. What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information, but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, acquaintance with the lives of heroic individuals, and some understanding of the strangely accidental and ephemeral position of man in the cosmos — all this touched with an emotion of pride in what is distinctively human, the power to see and to know, to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding. It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs.
“Every day think as you wake up, ‘Today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.’”
HH the Dalai Lama (b.1940) Tibetan Spiritual Leader
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Understanding Democratic Backsliding
For the last two decades, democracy has been in retreat. Autocracies now outnumber the world’s democracies, and countries that had made impressive democratic strides have been purposefully undoing those gains. Most confounding, this global democratic recession has been driven not by traditional coups but by elected leaders themselves.
Yet we have seen bright spots—notably, last month in Hungary and, before that, in Poland in 2023. To turn the tide back toward democracy, we must first understand what is driving democratic backsliding and how it is carried out, as well as what prodemocracy leaders and citizens can do to counter these forces. The following Journal of Democracy essays, now free for a limited time, do just that.
On Democratic Backsliding Old-fashioned military coups and blatant election-day fraud are becoming mercifully rarer these days, but other, subtler forms of democratic regression are a growing problem that demands more attention. Nancy Bermeo
Why Elected Leaders Subvert Democracy Today, the principal challenge to democracy is coming not from coups but from democratic erosion driven by elected leaders. What is behind this shift, and how can prodemocracy forces push back? Susan Stokes
The Anatomy of Democratic Backsliding Can we recognize the symptoms of backsliding before it’s too late? Though the signals are sometimes faint, a new study of sixteen cases around the world reveals key dynamics common to all. Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman
Misunderstanding Democratic Backsliding If democracies did a better job “delivering” for their citizens, so the thinking goes, people would not be so ready to embrace antidemocratic alternatives. Not so. This conventional wisdom about democratic backsliding is seldom true and often not accurate at all. Thomas Carothers and Brendan Hartnett
Delivering for Democracy: Why Results Matter Voters around the world are losing faith in democracy’s ability to deliver and increasingly turning toward more authoritarian alternatives. To restore citizens’ confidence, democracies must show they can make progress without sacrificing accountability. Francis Fukuyama. Chris Dann, and Beatriz Magaloni
Why Democracies Survive Democracies are under stress, but they are not about to buckle. The erosion of norms and other woes do not spell democratic collapse. With incredibly few exceptions, affluent democracies will endure, no matter the schemes of would-be autocrats. Jason Brownlee and Kenny Miao
The Danger Is Real Analysis that subtly defines away problems is not going to help democracies survive the threats they now face. The fear is warranted. Yascha Mounk
Questioning Backsliding It is no easy feat to agree on how democratic backsliding should be measured. No surprise scholars are coming up with strikingly different results. Nancy Bermeo
The Value of “Tyrannophobia” Democratic death has been exaggerated. But fear that a democracy is going to break down may, ironically, be one of the things that protects it. Tom Ginsburg
Follow the Leader Democracies are increasingly under attack by the leaders they elect. We may not know the damage until it is too late. Susan D. Hyde and Elizabeth N. Saunders
A Quiet Consensus We welcome the common ground. The challenge ahead is to protect democracies genuinely in peril, while not losing valuable time and resources chasing authoritarian ghosts. Jason Brownlee and Kenny Miao
The End of the Backsliding Paradigm Like the “transition paradigm” before it, the concept of democratic backsliding threatens to flatten our perceptions of complex political realities. Examples from East-Central Europe illustrate the ambiguous dynamics at play in many troubled democracies. Licia Cianetti and Seán Hanley
How Much Democratic Backsliding? Democracy’s retreat is real, yet alarmist reports of a global demise or crisis of democracy are not warranted. Valeriya Mechkova, Anna Lührmann, and Staffan I. Lindberg
“It is always a danger To aspirants on the Path When they begin To believe and act As if the ten thousand idiots Who so long ruled and lived inside Have all packed their bags And skipped town Or Died.”
POETRY
