Sublime

The large point is one of authority. Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader’s trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don’t diminish that belief. Don’t be kind of bold. Be bold.

you have a specific scope of authority (see figure 2-2) that derives from your authorizers’ expectations and that defines the limits of what you are expected to do. As long as you do what is expected of you, your authorizers are happy. If you do what you are supposed to do really well, you will be rewarded in the coin of the realm,

a synonym for quasi-governmental power, far different from the property of an individual.

If so, it would actually be possible to see almost all systems of established authority—religion, morality, politics, economics, and the criminal-justice system—as so many different fraudulent ways to presume to calculate what cannot be calculated, to claim the authority to tell us how some aspect of that unlimited debt ought to be repaid. Human fr

Psychologists suspect that teachers are in fact politicians. Of course, not self-confident enough to go into politics—they move to the schools and there they become presidents, prime ministers, emperors. Small children—and they order them and they force them. Psychologists also suspect that teachers have an inclination toward being sadistic, they w

billion other voices” and an “authority.” An authority is backed by something—by a list and a platform.