Excerpts: “Individuals or nations under pressure must take honest stock of their abilities and values. They must decide what of themselves still works, remains appropriate even under the new changed circumstances, and thus can be retained. Conversely, they need the courage to recognize what must be changed in order to deal with the new situation. That requires the individuals or nations to find new solutions compatible with their abilities and the rest of their being” (p. 6-7).

“But, shared among all those types of crisis, whatever their cause, is the sense that something important about one’s current approach to life isn’t working, and that one has to find a new approach” (p. 33).

“This difference further illustrates a sad truth: that success is not guaranteed to well-intentioned decent people, nor necessarily denied to evil people” (p. 173).

“Both Chile’s and Indonesia’s internal crises arose from political polarization, disagreement about deeply held core values, and a willingness to kill and to risk being killed rather than to compromise” (p. 174).

“I instead foresee one political party in power in the U.S. government or in state governments increasingly manipulating voter registration, stacking the courts with sympathetic judges, using those courts to challenge election outcomes, and then invoking ‘law enforcement’ and using the police, the National Guard, the army reserve, or the army itself to suppress political opposition” (p. 356).

“There isn’t widespread agreement that our fundamental problems are our polarization, voter turnout and obstacles to voter registration, inequality and declining socio-economic mobility, and declining government investment in education and public goods” (p. 378).

“In fact, honest self-appraisal requires two steps: First, an individual or a nation must possess accurate knowledge. But that can be difficult to acquire; failure to respond successfully to a crisis may be because of lack of information, rather than because of the moral vice of dishonesty. The second step is to evaluate knowledge honestly. Alas, any human familiar with nations or with other individual humans knows that self-deception is common in human affairs” (p. 435).

“Whether the problems are national or individual, crises tend to be complex, to require trying a series of possible solutions before identifying one that works, and thus to call for patience and for toleration of frustration, ambiguity, and failure” (p. 438).

Diamond, Jared (2019). Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis. New York: Hachette Book Group.