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7
Mar
2018
Another icon bit the dust recently.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, I worked among people who revered Saul Alinski. They took the side of the underdog – any underdog, it seemed. For 40 years, Alinski made a name for himself organizing those underdogs, particularly among the working-class areas of Chicago.
Alinski summed up his ideology in a book called Rules for Radicals.
He started out as the darling of the leftists who wanted to raise the underdogs. In the strange ways that social change evolves, he ended up as the darling of conservatives who wanted to keep the underdogs under. The Tea Party distributed Rules for Radicals to its members. Donald Trump built his entire presidential campaign on personalizing an enemy. Or enemies.
What the left initiates, the right will eventually co-opt.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: Seth Godin, Saul Alinski, Tea Party, Donald Trump, Rules for Radicals
24
Jan
I was born without a theory. About anything. I didn’t know up from down – literally, since I had just emerged from a watery and weightless womb.
But from that instant on, I started creating theories to help me make sense of the world I found myself in. Everyone does. We figure out that moms are warm, soft, and soothing. Floors are hard. Smiles make big people smile back.
As time passes, we develop theories about everything. As we amass more experience, those theories get more sophisticated, better at predicting outcomes. We figure out that compliments generate more support than criticism, for example. That men and women are different. That blue-chip stocks are a safer investment than snake oil or swampland.
And, for the most part, we modify our theories to take account of new facts as they emerge.
Tags: Seth Godin, theories, trains, belief systems