Mbarak

“we are now so prone to confuse great building projects with great social achievements. We will have to admit that it is beyond the scope of anyone’s imagination to create a community. We must learn to cherish the communities we have, they are hard to come by.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“in certain societies there is a systematic underestimate of one's own creativity”
― Albert O. Hirschman, Development Projects Observed

“But all these systems of ‘education’ lack provisions for freedom of experiment, for training and for expression of creative abilities by those who are to be taught. In this respect also all our pedagogues are behind the times.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“far more appealing and convincing defense of the occasional need for exaggeration of prospective benefits appears in an essay by Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher: The simplest improvements in social conditions require so huge an effort on the part of society that full awareness of this disproportion would be most discouraging and would thereby make any social progress impossible. The effort must be prodigally great if the result is to be at all visible…. It is not at all peculiar then that this terrible disproportion must be quite weakly reflected in human consciousness if society is to generate the energy required to effect changes in social and human relations. For this purpose, one exaggerates the prospective results into a myth so as to make them take on dimensions which correspond a bit more to the immediately felt effort…. [The myth acts like] a Fata Morgana which makes beautiful lands arise before the eyes of the members of a caravan and thus increases their efforts to the point where, in spite of all their sufferings, they reach the next tiny waterhole. Had such tempting mirages not appeared, the exhausted caravan would inevitably have perished in the sandstorm, bereft of hope.”
― Albert O. Hirschman, Development Projects Observed