Published in the November 2012 issue

Interviewed September 12, 2012

There's not a difficulty to having an insider's knowledge and an outsider's mind. The more you understand, the better off you are.

I have a cherry tree right below my deck at home. In the spring, the cherry tree has these beautiful white blossoms. Then cherries appear. Then everything falls off and the limbs have a whitish appearance. It looks like the tree is dead. But I know in a few months the blossoms will come again. And I find it somewhat encouraging that there is renewal amidst all this other stuff we're encountering in the political realm.

It was the mysticism, the otherworldly quality, that drew me toward the priesthood. Contrasting it with other alternatives, that path seemed to go in a more important direction.

I can remember the day. August 14, 1956. That's when I entered Sacred Heart Novitiate. It's primarily a life of silence, meditation, prayer, and study, with some servile labor mixed in. When I got there, I had my first experience with what was called magnum silencium. The great silence. It gave me a pit in my stomach. It was almost a physical pain not to talk. But you get used to it after a while. And then it goes away.

Silence gives you time to think.

I find watching politicians on TV boring for the most part. I don't watch very often. But sometimes I watch with curiosity — kind of like an anthropologist who's seeing what the hell is going on.

It's not just the politicians. It's the commentary afterwards. It's the endless talking heads. Sometimes they have something to say. But there are not twenty-four hours of something to say.

I had a political-science teacher who wrote about power and how the essence of a democracy is for the individual citizen to exercise power — that is, control over his or her life and the institutions that affect that person. I had another teacher, an anthropologist, who said that power is a myth. That there's only an idea of power. Because it's a myth, the people who chase after it chase after it without any kind of limitations and it becomes obsessional. He said that there is no power in one person, because we're all parts of the system and the part can't really control the whole because the whole is so much bigger.

Jogging forces me to pay attention to where I'm running.

Politics is a gotcha game. So you have to be careful. You can't just express yourself without some censorship.

I think I'm the only governor that has actually taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. These were perpetual vows--even though the pope released me from their obligation when I left the Jesuit order. But there is an experience there. Austerity is something of real value.

There is this notion captured by the phrase tantum quantum in Latin. What that stands for is: So much, how much. So much you need, that's how much you should get. That's the principle. I'm not saying I come close to that. But it's an ideal.

Our system of economy doesn't work that way. The notion of capitalism is the endless creation of new needs and desires. Then the fulfillment of those needs and desires by a proliferation of novelties, commodities, and new services. So the whole system depends on the opposite of tantum quantum. Now, how long and how stable that system is, that's another question.

When people want less of taxes and more of everything else, you've got a problem.

Human beings have a tendency to be off-balance.

I've been reviewing the history of the late Roman republic, and I found that the struggles between the senators — or what were called the optimates versus the populares — were endless and often violent. Some senators lined up with the masses. Others were more conservative and upheld the traditions of the elite and the old families. These struggles got more and more violent, and ultimately it all broke down. It seems like the nature of a republic is that there is a lot of struggle. That's just the way it is.

We're all embedded in this dance of colliding ideas.

One of the things I enjoy about being governor again is to be able to compare what I experience now with what I experienced thirty-five years ago. Looking back, what I appreciate is the stability of these larger institutions, or their inertia--they move very slowly. Whether you're trying to change a school system or a political party or some bureaucratic aspect of government, things just move relatively slowly. Absent a crisis, you can only nudge them. The people elected for four years or eight years are bit players.

You've gotta brush your teeth every day. You've gotta take in the laundry. You've gotta put food on the table. In the collective life, though, we're always fixing something and doing something. And I would say we're making a lot of progress. We just put a vehicle on Mars. Pretty amazing to put a one-ton vehicle on another planet. It was built in California by mostly Californians.

So there it is. We have a lot of capacity, but we have a lot of ignorance and prejudice and stupidity to go along with it.

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