Comments on "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World" by Anand Giridharadas

If you've found yourself wanting to scream at the "thought leaders" shoved down your throat on Public Broadcasting Service, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World will help you translate your rage into coherent English. Author Anand Giridharadas gives us an "insider-outsider" view of MarketWorld:

MarketWorld is an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo. It consists of enlightened businesspeople and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government and think tanks. It has its own thinkers, whom it calls thought leaders, its own language, and even its own territory -- including a constantly shifting archipelago of conferences at which its values are reinforced and disseminated in translated into action. MarketWorld is a network and community but it is also a culture and state of mind.

These elites believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo's reform. [p. 30]

Review: Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan

I've previously reviewed a Carl Sagan book, and I've discussed several books related to science. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space is a short introduction to the mission and perspective of The Planetary Society (Twitter).

It's important for those pretending to speak for Muslims to realize how many inherited ideas descendants of Enlightenment civilizations have discarded in the last two hundred years. I believe much religious discourse (Friday khutba, pamphlets, halaqat, satellite TV shows) is more concerned with entertaining the audience than exploring, imparting and promoting truth. Participants in this discourse usually don't know much about science or intellectual history in post-Enlightenment societies, and the audiences are of course a mixed group in this regard. Since audiences bore quickly with topics such as sincere worship, good character, and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, the only preachers who can maintain their interest (and support) are the ones who can continuously produce new messages, stories, insights, etc. Of course, these inevitably stray into pseudo-science, pseudo-sociology and pseudo-psychology.