janApr 4
George Washington who argued unsuccessfully that as president he should be addressed as “his highness,” was among those pushing to add a chief executive, or surrogate king, to our system of government.
—Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight
#kings #presidents
Show threadjan
Nearly all the colonists agreed that the Iroquois system of the (mostly male) elected representatives being elected only by the tribe’s women (who alone had the power to remove them from office) was a mistake. The colonists altered this so that only men could make such a decision.
—Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight
Apr 4 at 4:12amWeb
Show threadjanApr 4
…the core value of our culture is not cooperation but power. Power of gods over men. Power of one group of men over another; power of men over women; power over property (who owns what, and who’s not allowed to have it). Power of humans over the natural world. Power.
—Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight
#power #values
Show threadjanApr 4
It’s hardly surprising…that a culture that values power over all else would wipe out a culture that holds cooperation as its highest value. But does that mean that the culture that values power is better? Or that it will survive forever? Or even that it will survive one-hundredth as long as older cooperative cultures have?
—Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It's Too Late
#power #cooperation #values