Matthew Kern

“To function, a democracy needs to meet two conditions: it needs to enable a free public conversation on key issues, and it needs to maintain a minimum of social order and institutional trust.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“What turns someone into a populist is claiming that they alone represent the people and that anyone who disagrees with them—whether state bureaucrats, minority groups, or even the majority of voters—either suffers from false consciousness or isn’t really part of the people.[”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“People think they connect to the person, but in fact they connect to the story told about the person, and there is often a huge gulf between the two.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Our seeing and our hearing need to include, forgive, and reconcile what the rest of the world rejects, dismisses, and punishes. Now that is new! And that is also the ancient Enneagram. The New Zealand bishops call it moving “from retributive justice to restorative justice” in their 1996 pastoral letter. Such new thinking could rearrange our entire penal system, which is their reason for writing this letter, but it could also rearrange our pattern of human relationships. It was all contained in the biblical pattern of transformation, but up to now most of us just could not hear it, could not see it. God saves humanity not by punishing it but by restoring it! We overcome our evil not by a frontal and heroic attack, but by a humble letting go that always first feels like losing. Christianity is probably the only religion in the world that teaches us, from the very cross, how to win by losing. It is always a hard sell. Especially for folks who are into strength, domination, winning, and enforcing conclusions. God’s restorative justice is much more patient, and finally much more transformative, than mere coercive obedience.”
― Richard Rohr, The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective