One of the facts about man as man is that his vitalities may be elaborated in indeterminate variety. That is the fruit of his freedom. Not all of these elaborations are equally wholesome and creative. But it is very difficult to derive “in a necessary fashion” the final rules of his individual and social existence. It is this indeterminateness and variety which makes analogies between the “laws of nature” in the exact sense of the words and laws of human nature, so great a source of confusion. It is man's nature to transcend nature and to elaborate his own historical existence in indeterminate degree.
When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join in is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action. In such emergencies, it turns out that the purging component of thinking (Socrates’ midwifery, which brings out the implications of unexamined opinions and thereby destroys them—values, doctrines, theories, and even convictions) is political by implication.
Can a story really be so powerful that it overrides experience, scientific evidence, logic, and common sense? Of course it can, as Eric Hoffer showed us long ago in his book The True Believer.--David Sloan Wilson.
Today [2020], the most important politician in the developed world lives by facts supplied via political chat shows on his favoured propaganda network, tweets from unknown origins and his own rampaging id.--Nicholas Gruen, Australian economist.
Comparing these two time scales, [Brian] Arthur estimates that technology evolves at roughly “10 million times the speed of natural evolution.”
