The peril of ease: How the pursuit of comfort creates geopolitical vulnerability

“ Ginger got up, and stood in front of them.
' All people who on earth do dwell,' said he, ' go to America if they want to dwell—really dwell—on earth. If you want to have all material things at your command you will, if you are going to get them at all, get them quicker there than anywhere else. But if you attain your ambition, you will come back like cast iron. Everything that was a pleasure to you will be a business; you will play bridge with a cast-iron face, and ask for your winnings; you will study the nature of your soil before you plant a daisy in it ”

“ The assured and achieved conditions, the serenity, the security, the success, to put it vulgarly, shone in the light of their easiest law—that by which they emerge early from the complication of life, the great adventure of sensibility, and find themselves determined once for all, fortunately fixed, all consecrated and consecrating. ”

“ The implication of “ease” was thus a light to assist inquiry; it is always a gained fact about people—as to “where” they are, if not as to who or what—that they are either in confirmed or in casual possession of money, and thereby, presumably, of all that money may, in this negotiable world, represent. Add to this that the company came, in its provided state, by common report, from “all over,” that it converged upon Palm Beach from every prosperous corner of the land, and the case was clear for a compendious view of American society in the largest sense of the term. ”

“ To minimize pain and to multiply pleasure was one of Bertie's maxims; suffering of any sort was repugnant to him, whether he or another was the sufferer. Such a desire is part always of a kindly nature, but when, as in his case, it is a dominant factor, one of the dominant lords of conduct, it is the sign of a nature not only kindly, but emphatically lazy—one which will always drift as long as possible, one which in a moral sense will never go to the dentist before its teeth ache, and will then not try to have them saved, but take gas and part with them. ”

“ How often is not the prospect of future happiness thus sacrificed to one's impatient insistence upon an immediate gratification. ”

“ It has taken long, delicious years of security and monotony to produce you. You fit your frame with a perfection only equalled by the perfection with which your frame fits you. So this admirable old house, all time-softened white within and time-faded red without, so everything that surrounds you here and that has, by some extraordinary mercy, escaped the inevitable fate of exploitation: so it all, I say, is the sort of thing that, if it were the least bit to fall to pieces, could never, ah, never more, be put together again. ”

“ Russia: A Sophisticated Adversary The threat to U.S. technology from Russia will continue over the coming years as Moscow attempts to bolster an economy struggling with endemic corruption, state control, and a loss of talent departing for jobs abroad. Moscow’s military modernization efforts also likely will be a motivating factor for Russia to steal U.S. intellectual property. An aggressive and capable collector of sensitive U.S. technologies, Russia uses cyberspace as one of many methods for obtaining the necessary know-how and technology to grow and modernize its economy. ”

“ In practice, this means that Chinese state-owned and non-state-owned companies, as well as academic and cultural establishments and ordinary Chinese citizens, are liable to be (willingly or unwillingly) co-opted into espionage and interference operations overseas. SIS told the Committee:
when you look at the kind of threat surface, it is very big and the people gathering information will not always be intelligence services. So every state institution in China is ultimately subsumed to the Chinese Communist Party and the state and their military interests. ”

“ When the taste for physical gratifications amongst such a people has grown more rapidly than their education and their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away, and lose all self-restraint, at the sight of the new possessions they are about to lay hold upon. ”

“ The danger posed by Chinese illicit acquisition of data and technology—and emerging technology in particular—is discussed further in the Case Study on Industry and Technology. In the Energy sector, the Chinese government has a strategic imperative to acquire technology—through covert acquisition of IP—that will enable it to improve and increase domestic energy production. With severe pollution and environmental damage posing a possible threat to the CCP's popular support in China, there is a threat of economic espionage in the area of 'green' energy. ”

“ Cover, contacts and access China is unlikely to glean commercially valuable information directly from its investments, but Chinese involvement in the sector inevitably increases the risk of espionage by providing legitimate cover for Chinese nationals whose primary role may be to conduct espionage activity (either against the Civil Nuclear sector in particular, or UK targets more broadly) [47] and access to facilities and Intellectual Property (IP) that may not otherwise have been available. ”

“ And what if the whole of England was becoming every year more like a tended greenhouse plant, compared to the blind thrust of forces from the earth in other countries? For all the old landmarks, as the great wheel of human life whirled down the road of the centuries, seemed to be passing out of sight; the world was racing westwards, where America sat high on the seas, grown like some portentous mushroom in a single night. There, at the present moment, the inexorable, relentless logic of nature was working out its everlasting proposition that the one force in the material world was wealth. ”

“ But the leisured ease in which those fortunate people could live in those days was rapidly passing away, and Ginger, from an economical point of view, was a very small specimen of an interesting survival. For, provided that a thing is done equally well in a cheap way as in an expensive way, it is inexcusable in the public service not to have it done as cheaply as possible. Whether the complete application of this principle will be found wholly successful in its working will be for succeeding generations to determine. But even to-day we have, so to speak, a working model of it in America. ”

“ Once arrived on Long Island, a walk of a hundred yards or so leads to the ticket-office. Those hundred yards are uncovered, however; but since people who live on Long Island must pass them in order to get into the Delectable City, there is no reason why the railroad or the ferry-boat company should offer conveniences in the way of shelter to their passengers. Given competition, any line would vie with the others in mirrors and gilded furniture; but if there is none, why on earth spend a penny? Not a passenger the less will travel because the mode of transit is bestial. ”

“ Ease is the most that can be hoped from a sedentary and unactive habit; ease, a neutral state between pain and pleasure. The dance of spirits, the bound of vigour, readiness of enterprize, and defiance of fatigue, are reserved for him that braces his nerves, and hardens his fibres, that keeps his limbs pliant with motion, and by frequent exposure fortifies his frame against the common accidents of cold and heat. ”

“ Thus the characteristics of large and polished society come almost inevitably to be, wit and heartlessness—acuteness and perpetual derision. The same impatience of uniformity, and passion for variety, which give so much grace to their conversation, by excluding all tediousness and pertinacious wrangling, make them incapable of dwelling for many minutes on the feelings and concerns of any one individual ”

“ In a long series of action some will languish with fatigue, and some be drawn of by present gratifications; some will loiter because others labour, and some will cease to labour because others loiter: and if once they come within prospect of success and profit, some will be greedy and others envious; some will undertake more than they can perform, to enlarge their claims of advantage; some will perform less than they undertake, lest their labours should chiefly turn to the benefit of others.
The history of mankind informs us that a single power is very seldom broken by a confederacy. ”

“ At our entrance into the world, when health and vigour give us fair promises of time sufficient for the regular maturation of our schemes, and a long enjoyment of our acquisitions, we are eager to seize the present moment; we pluck every gratification within our reach, without suffering it to ripen into perfection, and crowd all the varieties of delight into a narrow compass; but age seldom fails to change our conduct ”

“ To the man of business all the world is a fable but the Stock Exchange: to the money-getter nothing has a real existence that he cannot convert into a tangible feeling, that he does not recognise as property, that he cannot 'measure with a two-foot rule or count upon ten fingers.' The want of thought, of imagination, drives the practical man upon immediate realities: to the poet or philosopher all is real and interesting that is true or possible, that can reach in its consequences to others, or be made a subject of curious speculation to himself! ”

“ The vagueness, the magnitude, the remoteness of the object, the resolute sacrifice of all immediate and gross advantages, clothe it with the privileges of an abstract idea, so that the project has the air of a fiction or of a story in a novel. ”

“ The longer the craving after food is unsatisfied, the more violent, imperious, and uncontroulable the desire becomes; whereas the longer the gratification of the sexual passion is resisted, the greater force does habit and resolution acquire over it ”

“ Secondly, this state of uneasiness grows more and more violent, the longer the relief which it requires is withheld from it: hunger takes no denial, it hearkens to no compromise, is soothed by no flattery, tired out by no delay. It grows more importunate every moment, its demands become larger the less they are attended to. The first impulse which the general love of personal ease receives from bodily pain will give it the advantage over my disposition to sympathise with others in the same situation with myself, and this difference will be increasing every moment, till the pain is removed. ”

“ Now the degree of excess in population, or the inconveniences to which we expose ourselves by inconsiderate gratification will depend entirely on the difference, be it more or less, between the strength of the passion in each individual, and the strength of moral restraint. If the latter principle is weak, it will require to be stimulated by the immediate apprehension of some very great inconvenience, before it will become a match for the importunity of physical desire. If it is strong, a general conviction of the propriety or prudence of self-denial will be sufficient to incline the balance. ”

“ That the trade of distilling, my lords, had advanced so fast among us, that our manufacturers of poison are arrived at the utmost degree of skill in their profession, and that the draughts which they prepare are greedily swallowed by those who rarely look beyond the present moment, or inquire what price must be paid for the present gratification; that the people have been so long accustomed to daily stupefaction, that they are become mutinous, if they are restrained from it ”

“ All the inducements of early society tend to foster immediate action; all its penalties fall on the man who pauses; the traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of inculcating that 'delays are dangerous,' and that the sluggish man—the man 'who roasteth not that which he took in hunting'—will not prosper on the earth, and indeed will very soon perish out of it. And in consequence an inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind. ”

“ It is not only uncertain, whether, through all the casualties and dangers which beset the life of man, we shall be able to reach the time appointed for happiness or wisdom; but it is likely, that whatever now hinders us from doing that which our reason and conscience declare necessary to be done, will equally obstruct us in times to come. It is easy for the imagination, operating on things not yet existing, to please itself with scenes of unmingled felicity, or plan out courses of uniform virtue; but good and evil are in real life inseparably united; habits grow stronger by indulgence ”

“ if we lose the virile, manly qualities, and sink into a nation of mere hucksters, putting gain above national honor, and subordinating everything to mere ease of life; ”

“ That system, again, which makes virtue consist in prudence only, while it gives the highest encouragement to the habits of caution, vigilance, sobriety, and judicious moderation, seems to degrade equally both the amiable and respectable virtues, and to strip the former of all their beauty, and the latter of all their grandeur. ”

“ Sometimes I resolved upon a more rigid economy: but economy is a principle that does not easily lay hold of any but a heart framed to receive it. It is a business of attentive and vigilant detail. It easily escapes the mind, amidst the impetuosity of the passions, the obstinacy of rooted propensities, and the seduction of long established habits. Marguerite, indeed, did not share with me in these follies; the simplicity and ingenuousness of her mind were such, that she would have been as happy in a cottage as a palace ”

“ If ceaseless vigilance is the price of liberty, more so is it true that ceaseless criticism of ever new opinions and ever new views, however distasteful, bizarre, and paradoxical, is the price of truth. ”

“ As the great end of society is mutual beneficence, a good man is always uneasy when he finds himself acting in opposition to the purposes of life; because, though his conscience may easily acquit him of malice prepense, of settled hatred or contrivances of mischief, yet he seldom can be certain, that he has not failed by negligence, or indolence; that he has not been hindered from consulting the common interest by too much regard to his own ease, or too much indifference to the happiness of others. ”

“ It will explain why the greatest abilities frequently fail to promote the happiness of those who possess them; why those who can distinguish with the utmost nicety the boundaries of vice and virtue, suffer them to be confounded in their own conduct; why the active and vigilant resign their affairs implicitly to the management of others; and why the cautious and fearful make hourly approaches towards ruin, without one sigh of solicitude or struggle for escape. ”

“ You have been virtuous, without the reputation or the peace which belongs to virtue. You have been charitable without doing good, and affectionate without having ever made a friend. You have wasted those attentions on the worthless which the worthy would have delighted to receive, and those talents on the frivolous which would have been cherished by the enlightened. You have defeated the use of a fine understanding by the want of common prudence, and robbed society of the example of your good qualities by your total inability to resist and oppose. ”

“ NN. Unlike the Civil Nuclear sector, the Energy sector appears to provide China with less potential for leverage, as it does not have the same long-term reliance issues that we see in the Civil Nuclear sector. Nevertheless, there are concerns in relation to the threat to the Energy sector from economic espionage (particularly in the area of new 'green' energy) and disruption.
OOO. We reiterate that foreign investment cases cannot be looked at in isolation and on their own merits. ”

“ The wealth, the aggrandizement, and power of nations, are commonly the effects of virtue; the loss of these advantages is often a consequence of vice. Were we to suppose men to have succeeded in the discovery and application of every art by which states are preserved and governed; to have attained, by efforts of wisdom and magnanimity, the admired establishments and advantages of a civilized and flourishing people ”

“ Having the wealth of their ancestors in their hands, and being, as man is, naturally prone to idleness, they will forget the industry of their fathers, and only think how they may live most lavishly, most splendidly. The gratification of the senses, attended [p. 383] by its concomitants, vice and degradation, will be the sole desire of all human aspiration. Society—its beautiful dependences and proportions destroyed—will fall into fragments and return to original anarchy. ”