Snowden: the case for prosecution (The Economist | Jan 10th 2014)

[struggle4progress]

66. What appeals to you, it seems, is a certain way of sneering knowingly, which permits you

to congratulate yourself for your sophisticated cynicism

But I regard that as a lazy substitute for the hard work actually required to understand the facts of the world and the techniques required at the present time to effect meaningful change

If people do not learn for themselves how to work out the actual facts and how to construct practical analyses, they learn nothing about how to effect change

So mere cynicism teachesnothing useful -- -- and therefore, it always serves the status quo

Our real task is neither to convince people that change is easy nor that change is impossible: it is to teach people how to learn for themselves actual facts in detail, how to construct usable analyses, and how to test those analyses in practice, with the aim of learning new facts and refining their analyses