Criticism

"But luckily," it says, "they had enough money to give the NDP caucus a raise." Uh, it says, "The reason they didn't give him a say re the pipeline is [chuckles] everyone the rest of Canada thinks he-- knows he's a joke." I, I actually think it's the opposite.

I think that everybody else knows in Canada that he's actually pretty good when it comes at critici- when it comes to criticizing things.

And if they gave him the opportunity where he'd go around looking for leverage, he'd probably find some and make it everybody's [chuckles] problem.

Maybe that's why they didn't involve him, but that's speculative.

And yet I want us to think about the two of these.

Because you see, Criticism is the most, shall we say, the most difficult to accept, but it's the most profitable of the two.

Whereas praise is the one that we love to hear the most of, but oftentimes can be destructive.

That is, if we do not handle praise correctly, it can destroy us.

You are saying to them, this is how important you are.

When you and I are able to receive the praise, deflect it to where we know it should be shared, whether it's your husband, your wife, your children, or your parents, or whatever it might be, people you work with, what you're doing is you're accepting it in a godly fashion.

And so no matter who you are, what the circumstance, if you and I can learn how to handle Criticism, no matter where it comes from.

If we can learn how to handle praise, no matter where it comes from.

Homer's poems were secular, not religious, and it may be noted that they are freer from immorality and savagery than sacred books that one could mention.

Their authority was immense, but it was not binding like the authority of a sacred book, and so Homeric criticism was never hampered like biblical criticism.

criticism.In this connection, notice may be taken of another expression and condition of freedom, the absence of sacerdotalism.

The priests of the temples never became powerful castes, tyrannizing over the community in their own interests and able to silence voices raised against religious beliefs.

The civil authorities kept the general control of public worship in their own hands.

We manufacture consolations here in America, while there are probably not a dozen men fighting in Europe who did not long ago give up every reason for their being there, except that nobody knew how to get them away.

but the intellectuals whom the crisis has crystallized into an acceptance of war have put themselves into a terrifyingly strategic position it is only on the craft in the stream they say that one has any chance of controlling the current forces for liberal purposes if we obstruct we surrender all power for influence if we responsibly approve we then retain our power for guiding we will be listened to as responsible thinkers while those who obstructed the coming of war have committed intellectual suicide and shall be cast into outer darkness Criticism by the ruling powers will only be accepted from those intellectuals who are in sympathy with the general tendency of the war.

Well, it is true that they may guide, but if their stream leads to disaster and the frustration of national life, is their guiding any more than a preference whether they shall go over the right hand or the left hand side of the precipice? Meanwhile, however, there is comfort on board.

Be with us, they call, or be negligible, irrelevant.

classes which are able to play an active and not merely a passive role in the organization for war get a tremendous liberation of activity and energy individuals are jolted out of their old routine many of them are given new positions of responsibility new techniques must be learnt wearing home ties are broken and women who would have remained attached with infantile bonds are liberated for service overseas a vast sense of rejuvenescence pervades the significant classes a sense of new importance in the world old national ideals are taken out readapted to the purpose and used as universal touchstones or moulds into which all thought is poured every

individual citizen who in peace times had no function to perform by which he could imagine himself an expression or living fragment of the state becomes an

active amateur agent of the government in reporting spies and disloyalists in raising government funds or in propagating such measures as are considered necessary by officialdom minority opinion which in times of peace was only irritating and could not be dealt with by law unless it was conjoined with actual crime becomes with the outbreak of war a case for outlawry Criticism of the state, objections to war, lukewarm opinions concerning the necessity or the beauty of conscription are made subject to ferocious

penalties, far exceeding in severity those affixed to actual pragmatic crimes.