POCKET PARADIGMS

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With the election of Reagan, this country began to turn its back on
values that had sustained it throughout its first two centuries - values
that included balancing power and wealth with concern for, cooperation
with, and compassion towards others in the community we called America.
In their place came a psychotic faith in the ubiquitous virtue of the
market, a faith almost creationist in its absence of objective
foundation, intellectually barren when not actually dishonest, and as
monomaniacal as the creed of the religious fundamentalist. Every other
aspect of existence - religion, family, morality, creativity, politics,
community, tradition, ethnicity - was declared merely a byproduct of the
marketplace. For the first time in our history, the self-serving
delusions of the privileged few became the standard for the whole
nation, propagated in politics, on campuses and in the media. - Sam
Smith

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