Word: contrarians
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Renowned psychologist Albert Ellis and co-author Emmett Velten challenge the orthodoxies of aging in Optimal Aging: Get Over Getting Older (Open Court). Ellis' smart, contrarian thinking will inspire many. "Ageism is a crucial fact of life in our culture, and talking openly about it is taboo. Older people--and you--had better break the taboo, not just with talk but with action. We had better do something about...
...market can make anyone look bad--even a billionaire investor like Laurence Tisch, who will step down as CEO of Loews Corp. by year's end. Shareholders may wish he had stepped down sooner, given his errant attempts to time the market over the past two years. Tisch, a contrarian, is smarter than most. After oil prices receded in the early '80s, his company bought oil tankers and drilling rigs at scrap-metal prices and later sold them for a tenfold gain. But he's lost big betting the company's cash against the Standard & Poor...
...replacement rate--the population will swell from its present 270 million to about 400 million before it levels off around 2050. That is a horde of people, too many for anyone who worries about future food and water supply, air quality and energy depletion (but not too many for contrarian scientists, energy-company spinmeisters and idealogues who rejoice that each new human being is a potential Mozart, or at least a potential customer, so the more the better...
Only last weekend I was characterized (good-naturedly) as someone who would like to have lived a century or two ago. I suppose that comports with my acknowledged contrarian sympathies, though it is not simply correct. I probably appreciate the alien world revealed in Plato's dialogues and Jane Austen's novels more than most others do. But it is because of this appreciation, not in spite of it, that I also probably appreciate our world and the possibilities of it more than most other...
Hence, I am a frank, but not a blind, contrarian. I have taken my lesson from the prudent Tocqueville: "I have tried to see not differently but further than any party." I have tried to understand the prejudices of all, while dogmatically accepting the prejudices of none. I have tried to educate myself and I hope I have educated in the process...