“For Example: The Freedom of Speech”
Divorced from its original purpose and justification, as a process of criticism, freedom to think and speak are not self-evident necessities. It is only from the hope and the intention of discovering truth that freedom acquires such high public significance. The right of self-expression is, as such, a private amenity rather than a public necessity. The right to utter words, whether or not they have meaning, and regardless of their truth, could not be a vital interest of a great state but for the presumption that they are the chaff which goes with the utterance of true and significant words.
But when the chaff of silliness, baseness, and deception is so voluminous that it submerges the kernels of truth, freedom of speech may produce such frivolity, or such mischief, that it cannot be preserved against the demand for a restoration of order or of decency. If there is a dividing line between liberty and license, it is where freedom of speech is no longer respected as a procedure of the truth and becomes the unrestricted right to exploit the ignorance, and to incite the passions, of the people. T-hen freedom is such a hullabaloo of sophistry, propaganda, special pleading, lobbying, and salesmanship that it is difficult to remember why freedom of speech is worth the pain and trouble of defending it.
them additional power above and beyond that which they had already acquired through financial or other professional success. Winning (or seizing) political office, or having the ability to influence political decisions, or having a base of political support directly empowers individuals. The source of the power is multifold. It is the power of the institutions that one has leadership within. It is the power of allocating the resources and setting the agenda for those institutions. It is the power to influence the creation of new laws and regulations, which offer the ability actually to institutionalize key ideas. It is the power of the history and national identity associated with those institutions. It is the power that comes from having quantifiable support among the people of a country or region. Government service is seen as legitimizing, as service to the community, with high posts also seen as the capstone of a career (although they often provide additional access and networks that can offer further opportunities for profit post-government). This leads directly to many top business leaders taking massive pay cuts to work in government.
“... I watched the coast. Watching a
coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There
it is before you—smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or
savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, 'Come and find out.'
This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with
an aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so
dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight,
like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was
blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to
glisten and drip with steam. Here and there grayish-whitish specks
showed up, clustered inside the white surf, with a flag flying above
them perhaps. Settlements some centuries old, and still no bigger than
pin-heads on the untouched expanse of their background. We pounded
along, stopped, landed soldiers; went on, landed custom-house clerks to
levy toll in what looked like a God-forsaken wilderness, with a tin shed
and a flag-pole lost in it; landed more soldiers—to take care of the
custom-house clerks, presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf;
but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care.
Once the meaning core is in place, you begin the hunt. The first [Merriam-Webster] thesaurus was compiled, yes, by hand, with editors flipping through the 
Mann, of course, had no idea quite how magic the mountain would become.
Walking through the metal detector into the welter of activity in theKongress Hotel’s lobby, it was once again clear. A small pride of women
swaddled in mink and all manner of tasteful bling glided past looking
vaguely predatory and, frankly, frightening. Behind them came their
husbands, a group of U.S. senators including John McCain of Arizona.
If we cheer for big money simply as big money, we're simply never going
to get right again. If we pretend to be vicariously rich in order to
avoid the fact that so many of us are becoming unnecessarily poor, if
the shift of the national wealth has within it elements that we're
willing to root for as though they were the U.S. Olympic Plutocrats
Team, we will get ourselves suckered again and again. This was a triumph
of the insiders, of the people who concocted credit-default swaps and
collateralized debt obligations, and the people who will do it again,
over and over, unless a more critical eye is placed upon them by the
institutions of self-government. This does nothing to ameliorate the
effects of our rigged casino economy. It solves nothing connected to
wealth inequality or unemployment. It is magic numbers on the screen to
which only a very few people have the password, and they're not sharing
it with anyone.
President Bush’s depiction of the past is sanitized, selective, and
self-serving where not simply false. The great liberating tradition to
which he refers is, to a considerable extent, poppycock. The president
celebrates freedom without defining it, and he dodges any serious
engagement with the social, cultural, and moral incongruities arising
from the pursuit of actually existing freedom. A believer for whom God
remains dauntingly inscrutable might view the president’s confident
explication of the Creator’s purpose to be at the very least
presumptuous, if not altogether blasphemous.
The old idea of a powerful philosopher-king who would put into practice
some carefully thought out plans was a fairy-tale invented in the
interest of a land-owning aristocracy. The democratic equivalent of this
fairy-tale is the superstition that enough people of good will may be
persuaded by rational argument to take planned action. History shows
that the social reality is quite different. The course of historical
development is never shaped by theoretical constructions, however
excellent, although such schemes might, admittedly, exert some
influence, along with many other less rational (or even quite
irrational) factors. Even if such a rational plan coincides with the
interests of powerful groups it will never be realized in the way in
which it was conceived, in spite of the fact that the struggle for its
realization would then become a major factor in the historical process.
The real outcome will always be very different from the rational
construction. It will always be the resultant of the momentary
constellation of contesting forces. Furthermore, under no circumstances
could the outcome of rational planning become a stable structure; for
the balance of forces is bound to change. All social engineering, no
matter how much it prides itself on its realism and on its scientific
character, is doomed to remain a Utopian dream. 
When a natural system reaches the point of criticality and collapses through a 
