Whole new theories of money were growing here like mushrooms: in the dark and based on bullshit.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the emergence of new monetary theories that lack foundation and clarity.
Terry Pratchett's quote highlights the proliferation of unconventional and dubious monetary theories that sprout without sufficient evidence or rational basis. Comparing them to mushrooms that grow in the dark suggests that these ideas develop secretly and without scrutiny, ultimately pointing to the absurdity and potentially harmful implications of such unexamined perspectives in finance.
In practice
In a finance seminar discussing the validity of new economic theories.
And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.
They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
There is a foundation for our lives, a place in which our life rests. That place is nothing but the present moment, as we see, hear, experience what is. If we do not return to that place, we live our lives out of our heads. We blame others; we complain; we feel sorry for ourselves. All of these symptoms show that we're stuck in our thoughts. We're out of touch with the open space that is always right here.
To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.
It is not by great acts but by small failures that freedom dies. . . . Justice and liberty die quietly, because men first learn to ignore injustice and then no longer recognize it.
Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided.
Ignoring the mind is a beautiful sadhana. This is what many of the sages did. They ignored the mind out of existence. It loses its influence and its potency when it is ignored.
It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.
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