There is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting.

Of course, corporations and governments have a right to something for their money. They pay the wages. But they don't have the ethical right to literally purchase the copyright of a citizen's potential contribution to society. In a democracy they should not have the legal right to silence the quasi-totality of the functioning élite in order to satisfy a managerial taste for control and secrecy.

Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.

Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exceptions of this statement and death.

As an inclusive quality, imagination is thus our primary force for progress, whatever progress is.

A commercial civilization is money-oriented, profit-oriented. Commercial values always tend to wrench a society free of tradition.Economics from education to public service is being reorganized on the self-destructive basis of self-interest.

All the lessons of psychiatry, psychology, social work, indeed culture, have taught us over the last hundred years that it is the acceptance of differences, not the search for similarities which enables people to relate to each other in their personal or family lives.