"At this stage in my life I am ashamed to say how long I lived under the assumption that there really are two kinds of people. There are the "good people" with principles who think about human rights and moral issues but they are pretty dumb about the world. And then there are hard-nosed realists, who really know what the world is all about. They make the hard choices and "bite the bullet" and leave us with the mess we have.
It had not occurred to me that the world is in a mess because of the hard nosed realists. The "good people" (whom one couldn't trust because they are soft and think of human rights and of little children or old ladies) in fact have contributed little to the mess. That mess is evidence that the hard-nosed guys don't know what they are doing. They believe in Newtonian force-counterforce stuff and they haven't a clue about living organisms, about emotion, or about the evolution of community. The discourse that we wish has to begin by clearly understanding that we face a mess that is caused by a wrong model of society and humanity. Though we have assumed that the "good people" have nothing to say, the fact is that the hard-nosed realists have nothing to say. Let us acknowledge the failure of method. It's not that we want to substitute one jerk with another one - a gentleman jerk, say, with a lady jerk. A method itself fails when it does not take into account this fundamental truth - that cooperation (non-violence) not only might work; it works in ninety percent of the cases."
~ Ursula Franklin
