«Formal discourse becomes politically powerful when it becomes ideology; when it
articulates and fuses into effective formulations opinions and attitudes that are otherwise too scattered and vague to be acted upon; when it mobilizes a
general mood, «a set of disconnected, unrealized private emotions,» into «a public possession, a social fact»; when it crystallizes otherwise inchoate social and political discontent and thereby shapes what is otherwise instinctive and directs it to attainable
goals, when it clarifies, symbolizes, and elevates to structured consciousness the mingled urges that stir within us.
I invite you to read the Sustainable Development
Goals, the compact adopted by the United Nations last fall at the seventieth
general assembly, which
articulates a vision of what it would take to create a world with sustainable peace.