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Sharing Vulnerable Stories As Brené Brown now famously discusses in her book Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, vulnerability is when we share something we fear may cause others to reject us. This includes uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.1 Strong communities share stories in which leadership, members, or even the overall organization was vulnerable. These stories build strong bonds. They may include accounts of failure, or the fears, feelings, and truths we don’t want the whole world to know. These stories are so important that if they’re not shared, and the vulnerability and intimacy is never built, there will almost certainly be a superficial feeling of connection among members and with leadership.
The Art of Community
Charles Vogl
The H-bomb is the ultimate in deathmanship, a missile which may be anywhere from twenty-five to a thousand times more destructive than the weapons dropped in 1945. The energy for the A-bomb comes from fission, the splitting of uranium atoms; the H-bomb’s power comes from fusion, the uniting of hydrogen atoms—the very process by which the sun gives light. Fusion can occur only at very high temperatures; therefore H-bombs are called thermonuclear weapons. Their theoretical possibilities had long been known, but after the horrors of Hiroshima conversations about them among atomic physicists were awed and guarded. The hypothetical new bomb was called the “Super.” From time to time cryptic references to it appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, but the editors never defined it. In their opinion, the less the world knew about the Super, the better. Teller disagreed. At Berkeley in the summer of 1942 he had been one of seven physicists who had mulled over the feasibility of man-made fusion, and he never forgot what he later called the thrilling “spirit of spontaneous expression, adventure and surprise.” To his disappointment, the consideration of thermonuclear possibilities was discontinued in 1943. Since the temperatures required were so high that only a fission bomb could produce them, the fission riddle had to be solved first, anyhow, and once that happened, it was thought, they ought to stop. At about this time Teller began speaking of the mythic Super as “my baby.” His colleagues were glad to leave it to him.
The Glory and the Dream
William Manchester
Yeltsin: Chaos and Criminality Many things changed after the fall of the Soviet Union. But as society was rapidly transformed, it became obvious that there had been no moral revolution in Russia. Communist society had taken it for granted that the individual was expendable; postcommunist Russia did as well, often to an even greater degree. Yeltsin was a hero to many Russians after he successfully led the resistance to the August 1991 pro-communist coup. But neither Yeltsin nor the “young reformers” whom he put in charge of Russia’s transformation showed any understanding of the need to establish the rule of law and the habits of respect for the individual. For Yeltsin and the reformers, the goal was to reach a “point of no return,” beyond which it would be impossible to restore socialism regardless of the will of the people. Property had to be put into private hands as quickly as possible, and this was done with little regard for who received the property or on what basis. Capitalism was created. But by carrying out the largest peaceful transfer of property in history without the benefit of law, the reformers created the conditions for the criminalization of the whole country. The new society that emerged had three outstanding characteristics: an economy dominated by a criminal oligarchy, an authoritarian political system, and, perhaps most important, a moral degradation that subverted all legal and ethical standards and made real civil society impossible. Their interaction set the stage for Russia’s drift into a regime of aggression and terror.
The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep
David Satter
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