The City

In a child’s words. Some decisions belong to the people responsible for everyone’s good. They weigh it, and nobody can work it out for them like a sum.

The Institute habit

Mr. Curtain’s plan in three stages: manufacture a fear, soothe it, then rule the people who are grateful. A city run by working out fears instead of judging for the good.

The book

The Whisperer stolen, the children held, and each one’s part in getting out.

Week 1 · the kind of answer

Draw who is responsible for what: in the house, the parish, the town, the province. Recall the first book: when Milligan came to take the children home, they stayed. Whose judgment was that, and what did they weigh?

Week 2 · the essay

The Senate at Capri, in the register of Tacitus, read whole. Write the diary of a senator on the day Thrasea Paetus walked out: did you follow him? Four Dreadful Words is optional, for its neighbour test.

Week 3 · the case

The conditions in the Catechism (2309) for the use of force: lasting, grave and certain damage, other means ineffective, serious prospects of success, no graver evils produced. No one can compute them; they are supplied by those responsible. An authority that has weighed all four may act, on its judgment. One that has skipped the comparison of evils has no answer at all. Try it on a family decision: who supplies the judgment, and what happens when one condition is skipped?

The workshop · suggested

For a child taking the workshop strand, Project 5, the computer. It ends: memory, the CPU and the whole Computer, a small city of parts, each given what the whole needs from it.

The end first

Draw the household’s ends as a graph: each person’s, the family’s, the parish’s. Many paths run into the common good, and how to reach it is judged by those responsible, never computed.

Fridays

Spot the Whisperer: a headline built to make you afraid first and grateful second.