Matthew Kern

“How can you tell, then, whether someone is part of the people or not? Easy. If they support the leader, they are part of the people. This, according to the German political philosopher Jan-Werner Müller, is the defining feature of populism.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“When the first disciples of Jesus wanted to make the whole process into right rituals and right roles, and by implication right belief systems (common to all religion), Jesus told them, “You do not know what you are asking. Until you drink of the cup that I must drink, and be baptized with the baptism that I will be immersed in” (Mark 10:38), you basically do not know what I am talking about. You have nothing to say. It is not that we have a message and then suffer for it. It is much more the opposite: We suffer, come through it transformed, and then we have a message! This is the clear Jesus pattern and why he trained his disciples in the necessary path of suffering. There is something, it seems, that we can know in no other way. We hope to bypass such suffering by being moral, by being orthodox, by being ritualistic, but his words remain the same to us: “The cup that I must drink, you must also drink” (Mark 10:39). Enlightenment, conversion, seeing the truth is a journey of transformation, not membership in the right group or reciting the correct formulas or even practicing the right morality. As Paul made so clear both in his letters to the Romans and to the Galatians, law can give you correct information, but only God’s Spirit of love can transform you. It must have been a pretty important point to spend two letters of the New Testament in making it. He knew religion’s constant temptation to moralism, and he was one of those geniuses who had the bigger, but, oh, so subtle, truth.”
― Richard Rohr, The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective

“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

“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