It is base usury to regard a benefit as an investment. Seneca on On Benefits.
"I have a dream," said Martin Luther King as the crowd stretched to the horizon. But the dream died. Now we have social capital markets, and increasingly efficient and effective research, metrics, and implementation to support the movement of money through a transactional system to a measurable result.
Professor David Sturm lectures brilliantly on immersive story-telling, truth and fiction, and the formation of community in this 45 minute YouTube video. At How to Save the World Dave Pollard reflects on his avatars online (at his blog and in Second Life in particular) and his "real life" and how over time his identities and communities have begun to fuse, not without unease among some who know him in one role or another.
When the Puritans closed the theaters in London, saying poets lie to us and lead us astray from truth, Sir Philip Sydney wrote his Defense of Poesie. He suggests that history, philosophy, and sermon may help us know the truth, but poetry transforms us so that we might act and live in truth, in virtue. We may be inspired by a hero with whom we identify; our hearts may be lifted to emulate what we admire, or we may by the satirist, be made ashamed of our vices, and laughed out of our folly.
"Once upon a time there was a little boy. All he knew of story was what he saw on television. Mostly it was brands and cartoons. Being a precocious child he graduated at age 12 to the financial news, the story of who made a killing. He dreamed that he would some day grow up and turn the whole world into an efficient market...." Is that not the saddest story you ever heard?
