Thesis: Winning elections is pointless when the culture and the people themselves are corrupt. A few people at the top won’t be able to change the character of an entire nation. We have to build a better society from the ground up.

Antithesis: Any effective cultural change must go through the centers of power and influence; elites alone have the power to change society. All of the largest social changes of the last century were imposed from the top down.

Possible syntheses: (more…)

His Majesty was in rare good humor this morning.

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As I mentioned to Bruce Charlton in the comments section of a previous post, once you get His Majesty monologuing, you can’t get him to shut up.

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You never know what will get His Majesty monologuing over breakfast.

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It’s been said that the difference between a dialogue and a monologue is that a dialogue is something two intelligent people have in order to seek common ground, while a monologue is something one mentally ill person does on a street corner where he’s sleeping on the ground.

That isn’t quite true. I’ve found that His Majesty is actually quite fond of monologues at breakfast, at least so long as he’s the one delivering.

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This is an interesting problem for missionaries. Being a missionary is wierd. It is not “just like you.” But if the missionaries do too much to overcome this barrier, its not obvious that they have anything different to offer. Maybe its not coincidence that in Spain most of the members came from the minority of Catholics who took Catholicism pretty seriously.