Thoughts for the Day: Monday 14 September 2020

 

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Recognize how you're feeling.
Acknowledge you are responsible for how you feel.
Allow yourself to feel without blame. Don't suppress how you feel. Don't feel guilty about feeling.
Take yourself out of your mind and into your body. Ask yourself where you're feeling it in your body?

You're not a prisoner of your feelings. When we suppress how we feel, our emotions become a negatively coiled spring waiting to pounce. The smallest disturbance can set the off without warning. When you rehash what happened, you only coil them more. When you blame other people for how you feel, you absolve yourself from something you are responsible for.

Instead feel without guilt or shame. It's ok to feel. Feel it in your body fully and it will pass quickly.

--Shane Parrish, Farnum Street

"It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves." ― Franz Kafka, The Trial  

"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty." — Hannah Arendt

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

To be a monad, as opposed to an atom; to be a world in itself unconnected with an indefinite number of other such worlds, each windowless and ignorant of a whole whose parts they nevertheless are—this is to be a work of art.

And from Hannah Arendt's Essays in Understanding, "Understanding & Politics:"

The fact that reconciliation is inherent in understanding has given rise to the popular misrepresentation tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner. Yet forgiving has so little to do with understanding that it is neither its condition nor its consequence. Forgiving (certainly one of the greatest human capacities and perhaps the boldest of human actions insofar as it tries the seemingly impossible, to undo what has been done, and succeeds in making a new beginning where everything seemed to have come to an end) is a single action and culminates in a single act. Understanding is unending and therefore cannot produce final results.

(Location 6167)

Thoughts for the Day (with a New Feature!): Sunday 13 September 2020

 The proper meaning of a word … is never something upon which the word sits perched like a gull on a stone; it is something over which the word hovers like a gull over a ship’s stern. Trying to fix the proper meaning in our minds is like coaxing the gull to settle in the rigging, with the rule that the gull must be alive when it settles: one must not shoot it and tie it there. The way to discover the proper meaning is to ask not, ‘What do we mean?’ but, ‘What are we trying to mean?’

--R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (hat-tip to David Pierce for the quote in his blog https://polytropy.com/2020/09/01/map-of-art/ (Pierce, a professional mathematician, is also a Collingwood . . . shall we say "enthusiast"? I'm not sure the right term for him or me regarding our attitude toward Collingwood, but we're both avid readers & proponents of Collingwood's thought.) 

Beyond the Robot

Gary Lachman

Meaning perception is our ability to step back and see something as a whole, to see the forest, and not only the trees. Immediacy perception, as its name suggests, is our ability to focus on individual details, what is immediately before us. It is like a searchlight. It has a powerful beam, yet it has one problem: “it can only focus on one thing at a time,” hence Hume’s failure to see the connection between cause and effect.

SNG note: This is written about Colin Wilson discussing Whitehead and (in effect) anticipating McGilchrist.)

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Clearly, progress is not wholly concerned with resources, but how resources are distributed between individuals within one generation and between generations is a matter that no discussion of progress can ignore.

The Daily Stoic

Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman

If we can focus on making clear what parts of our day are within our control and what parts are not, we will not only be happier, we will have a distinct advantage over other people who fail to realize they are fighting an unwinnable battle.

And in a new feature that I'll start today, I'll be quoting from Hannah Arendt's Essays in Understanding: 1930-1954 (at the end of the post). I'll be starting with the essay "Understanding & Politics," which was originally published in Partisan Review in 1954. I'm reading this collection of essays as a part of my participation in the Virtual Reading Group of Arendt's works hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College and led by its director, Professor Roger Berkowitz and assistant director Samantha Rose Hill. These quotes will sometimes be longer than a sentence, perhaps a paragraph or two--I want to capture complete thoughts. While normally I like to keep my quotes to bite-size morsels, sometimes you want to sink your teeth into something meatier, or at least I do. Arendt provides so many meaty quotes that I find compellingly relevant to our times that I want to share a bunch of them. And, apropos Arendt, I want to prompt you to think.

The quote for today (a short one):

"Understanding, as distinguished from having correct information and scientific knowledge, is a complicated process which never produces unequivocal results. It is an unending activity by which, in constant change and variation, we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in the world."

--Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 12 September 2020

 

Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic

B. Alan Wallace

It is not an emergent property or function of matter, and the unquestioned belief that it must be is the greatest superstition promoted by scientists today. Consciousness, its origins, and its role in nature remain unknown to modern science.

I and Thou, Trans. Kaufmann

Martin Buber and Walter Kaufmann

The world as experience belongs to the basic word I-It. The basic word I-You establishes the world of relation.

John Adams

David McCullough

“Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots,” and he [Adams] lamented that so much more blood would have to flow before the lesson was learned.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

It is the specific danger of all forms of government based on equality that the moment the structure of lawfulness—within whose framework the experience of equal power receives its meaning and direction—breaks down or is transformed, the powers among equal men cancel each other out and what is left is the experience of absolute impotence. Out of the conviction of one’s own impotence and the fear of the power of all others comes the will to dominate, which is the will of the tyrant.

Thoughts of the Day: 11 September 2020

 "Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive."

— Zadie Smith

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

Edmund Morris

“THEODORE,” THE BIG MAN SAID, eschewing boyish nicknames, “you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I know you will do it.”

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

C.G. Jung

We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

The spectator, not the actor, holds the clue to the meaning of human affairs—only, and this is decisive, Kant’s spectators exist in the plural, and this is why he could arrive at a political philosophy. Hegel’s spectator exists strictly in the singular: the philosopher becomes the organ of the Absolute Spirit, and the philosopher is Hegel himself. But even Kant, more aware than any other philosopher of human plurality, could conveniently forget that even if the spectacle were always the same and therefore tiresome, the audiences would change from generation to generation; nor would a fresh audience be likely to arrive at the conclusions handed down by tradition as to what an unchanging play has to tell it.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 10 September 2020

 "Evil comes from a failure to think."

— Hannah Arendt

The Idea of Nature

R. G. Collingwood

The question was: How are we to find a changeless and therefore knowable something in, or behind, or somehow belonging to, the flux of nature-as-we-perceive-it? In modern or evolutionary natural science, this question does not arise, and the controversy between ‘materialism’ and ‘idealism’, as two answers to it, no longer has any meaning.

This controversy became meaningless because its presuppositions had undergone a revolutionary change by the beginning of the nineteenth century. By then historians had trained themselves to think, and had found themselves able to think scientifically, about a world of constantly changing human affairs in which there was no unchanging substrate behind the changes, and no unchanging laws according to which the changes took place. History had by now established itself as a science, that is, a progressive inquiry in which conclusions are solidly and demonstratively established.

The Caretakers of the Cosmos

Gary Lachman

Life is organised energy, organised matter, and it seems to move in a direction against the general flow of matter; we can say that life flows uphill. This is what Bergson means by a ‘creative evolution’, one that intentionally invades matter and organises it for its own aims and purposes. These, Bergson believed, were to gain greater and greater control over matter and hence increased freedom. I suspect scientists would say that I misunderstand entropy, but I do believe that life is anti-entropic.

We Are the Builders of Our Fortunes

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Time Warrior

Steve Chandler

If you have a healthy ego—designed by you for successful interaction with society and other egos—you can use it consciously to achieve goals and keep commitments. You can also preserve your spirit and soul in the process, being in this world but not of it.

Mavericks, Mystics, and Misfits: Americans Against the Grain by Arthur Hoyle

At first glance, this book may strike a potential reader as simply an "American lives" collection, which, in a sense, it is. But it is more than just a collection of lives of Americans, some famous, some not. (I recognized the names of only five of the 10 subjects of the book, and I suspect that my rate of acquaintance with the subjects won't prove unusual.) The subjects run the course of American history from the Puritans Roger Williams and Anne Bradstreet to contemporary Californians Judith Baca and the husband-and-wife team of Warren Brush and Sylvia Harvan-Brush. Each of the individuals or (two) couples are the subjects of chapters that address their lives, their works, and their aspirations. Hoyle treats both his historical subjects and his contemporary subjects with equal care and adroitness. Each chapter captures the gist of the project (or projects) of each individual or couple and their place in the course of American history. Each chapter represents describes a snippet of the diversity of the American experience: Puritans Williams and Bradstreet; the agitator for revolution Thomas Paine; the western explorer Josiah Gregg; the escaped slaves-turned-abolitionists-turned educators of post-Civil War freed slaves, William and Ellen Craft; the unsettling academic Thorstein Veblen; the immigrant, worldly mystic Thomas Merton; the Pawnee soldier-artist Brummett Echohawk; the artist-activist Judith Baca; and the environmentalist couple Brush and Harvan-Brush. Quite an eclectic list! 

I should note that each chapter is a succinct and well-written mini-biography of the subject (or couple). And each chapter is framed by a brief introduction that frames the chapter within the context of surrounding events. 

But the source with the book's success with me comes from what is, at least for some, an unexpected place: the Introduction.  And a piece of advice: read the introduction to a book! 

In this book, Hoyle, in three pages, transforms what would otherwise prove simply a potpourri of interesting American lives into a study of the American experience and American values. Hoyle states the intention of his book neatly in the opening paragraph: 

This book profiles exemplary American men and women whose lives collectively span the history of our country from the period of the first Puritan settlements to the present time. These individuals have been chosen because of their life stories, thought often at variance with the directions of the mainstream society around them, exhibit certain enduring qualities of the American character that persist despite the changing circumstances of time and place. (1)

Note what Hoyle is positing here: "the American character." I believe that earlier in my life to posit something like "the American character" would have been utterly unremarkable. But in our current situation, such a contention might prove highly contentious. "We have so many differences! We are so diverse! E Pluribus Unum is a fraud!"  Or some would so argue. But Hoyles's introduction, and each chapter that recounts the lives and projects of individuals from disparate times, backgrounds, and interests, demonstrate that Hoyle posits a sound position when he identifies "the American character" based on sets of common experiences and values even as he notes and celebrates our distinctions and differences. 

Hoyle identifies the first American challenge as that of the first European immigrants to adopt European traditions and modes of living to the "realities of the New World." (N.B. Don't let this contention mislead you into thinking that Hoyle is not cognizant of the American Indian experience, he is. (See the chapter about Brummett Echohawk.) But "America" was not "America" until the Europeans arrived. Before European exploration and colonization, this was a land of many peoples who understood their land and their world very differently from how they experienced it after the arrival of the Europeans.) Hoyle recognizes that the earlier colonists came for a variety of reasons, some to escape religious prosecution and others for the prospect of economic opportunity. And both of these motives (and no doubt a host of other reasons between these two extremes) fostered the development 

of two seemingly contradictory traits that enabled survival in the New World--independence and cooperation--that have unfolded in a dynamic tension across American history. Independence required the development of individualism and self-sufficiency. The need for cooperation required the recognition of each man's equality; it also encouraged conformity. . . . From these two imperatives sprang the basic values that were codified in America's Delcartion of Idependence from England: liberty (personal freedom), and equality (personal freedom for all). These two values have become the bedrock of American character.

 Hoyle, however, adds a third trait that becomes the tie that binds his subjects together as a set of representatives that range throughout American history: dissent. Beginning with the Puritans and Quakers: 

These religious groups insisted on the right of individual conscience, a right that transcends the authority of public opinion and even the authority of law. The right of dissent is the supreme affirmation of individual right--the right to whistle your own tune and to dispute the majority when you believe that its attitudes and policies threaten liberty and equality.  . . . 

Dissent has continued to arise when people feel that one of the country's founding principles is being violated or kept unfulfilled. Some of the main historical causes of dissent have been slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and discrimination against ethnic minorities; unjust treatment of Native American peoples; the subordinate political and economic status of women; and economic inequities between capital and labor.

Dissent becomes an avenue of reform. And Hoyle identifies each of his subjects as a "dissenter' and an "exemplar" (borrowing the term from a previous subject of Hoyle's, Henry Miller). Thus, each of these subjects provides an example of the "tension we find inherent in the American character between the interests of the individual and interests of the group . . ." Hoyle concludes his introduction with this declaration: 

For dissenters, by acting on their individual vision even though it may be at variance with received wisdom or prevailing custom, even though it may threaten the established order, often serve the common good by opening new vistas and liberating others. We owe them our gratitude.

I must say that I agree with Hoyle's declaration about each of his subjects. 

However, Hoyles's contention raises an issue that bothered me as I read about these individuals who, with their individual faults and shortcomings, I admire. The ills they addressed and the hopes to which they aspired (or aspire) I find admirable. But dissent can run both ways: slaveholders were dissenters (rebels), as were the Klan, white supremacists, eugenicists, John Birchers and militiamen types, and so on. Dissent, per se, gives us no guidance about what course we should choose now. Today, amid our pandemic, some "dissenters" say we need not wear masks and that to compel anyone to do so is a violation of personal freedom; that the whole idea of a lethal pandemic is a hoax; and so on--just to name one topic! In short, dissent as an admirable trait often only after it reaches a degree of certainty after the fact. Dissent is often used as a tool of persuasion (via both ethos and pathos) by both sides of a disputed contention to bolster the moral and emotional authority of their position--the mantle of "dissenter" is often coveted in American public discourse. Dissenters about topics such as those that concern the common good or the truths of science may later receive vindication, but sometimes not until after they're dead and buried and posterity has taken an opportunity to come to a different conclusion than their forebearers. We must remain mindful that our ability to separate the sheep from the goats is an imperfect process and that we all too easily confuse the two. This lesson from history should prompt us to strive with the utmost care to judge those among us whom we may be inclined to deem needless pests or even genuine threats. If we judge prudently perhaps we can identify those among us who can improve the lot our nation, such as those whose lives Hoyle has shared here. 

 

Thoughts of the Day: Thursday 9 September 2020

 “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”

― Michel de Montaigne 

 

​“Action without a name, a 'who' attached to it, is meaningless.”​

--Hannah Arendt

Why Liberalism Failed

Patrick J. Deneen

There has always been, and probably always will be, economic inequality, but few civilizations appear to have so extensively perfected the separation of winners from losers or created such a massive apparatus to winnow those who will succeed from those who will fail.

The 33 Strategies of War

Robert Greene

Enemies also give you a standard by which to judge yourself, both personally and socially.

Rationality

Eliezer Yudkowsky

To do better, ask yourself straight out: If I saw that there was a superior alternative to my current policy, would I be glad in the depths of my heart, or would I feel a tiny flash of reluctance before I let go? If the answers are “no” and “yes,” beware that you may not have searched for a Third Alternative.

The World Beyond Your Head

Matthew B. Crawford

The image of human excellence I would like to offer as a counterweight to freedom thus understood is that of a powerful, independent mind working at full song. Such independence is won through disciplined attention, in the kind of action that joins us to the world. And-this is important-it is precisely those constraining circumstances that provide the discipline.

Thoughts of the Day: Tuesday 8 September 2020

 

Making Make-Believe Real

Garry Wills

Those who see nothing but selfish interest in all human action cannot explain why, for some causes, good and bad—nationalism, racism, religion, patriotism—people sacrifice themselves. Of course, selfish aims can be masked as all these “higher” goals. But dissimulation of selfishness, faction, or zealotry is a social lubricator, and in some cases an essential one. It must, admittedly be a plausible pretense. To work, make-believe must be believable, and an array of talents, political and poetic, labored the illusion into place for Elizabeth.

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

First there was the myth of the unity of science – the left hemisphere's view that there is one logical path to knowledge, irrespective of context; whereas in reality science is, to quote Gaukroger again, ‘a loose grouping of disciplines with different subject matters and different methods, tied in various ways each of which work for some purposes but not for others’

The Soul's Code

James Hillman

The invisible source of personal consistency, for which I am using the word “habit,” psychology today calls character.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Given that Collingwood’s philosophy of history is based on a sharp distinction between history and science, we may be surprised by his insistence that it is as a science that he wishes history to be recovered. But history does not become a science by aping natural science. Rather it becomes a science only through a greater self-consciousness of its autonomy. It is the distinctiveness of history that is the source of its creativity and its capacity for systematic understanding.

Thoughts of the Day: 7 September 2020

 "Simplicity is the end result of long, hard work; not the starting point." 

— Frederick Maitland

"If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer." — Hannah Arendt

"Tradition orders the past, hands it down, interprets it, omits, selects, and emphasizes according to a system of pre-established beliefs. Tradition is a mental construct and as such always subject to critical examination." Hannah Arendt, 1969

Eisenhower in War and Peace

Jean Edward Smith

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. —DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

Metaphors We Live By

George Lakoff, Mark Johnson

Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.

Thoughts for the Day: 6 September 2020

 

The Collected Works of Henry Adams

Henry Adams

History had no use for multiplicity; it needed unity; it could study only motion, direction, attraction, relation. Everything must be made to move together; one must seek new worlds to measure; and so, like Rasselas, Adams set out once more, and found himself on May 12 settled in rooms at the very door of the Trocadero.

The Trivium

Sister Miriam Joseph

Each of the liberal arts is both a science and an art in the sense that in the province of each there is something to know (science) and something to do (art).

Two Essays on Colin Wilson

Gary Lachman

“Life failure” is the central problem for Wilson. We are all familiar with it. Its most common form is boredom, which, Wilson tells us, is essentially a kind of drooping of intentionality.

Immoderate Greatness

William Ophuls

Unfortunately, although naturally clever, human beings are not innately wise, especially in crowds.

Thoughts of the Day: 5 September 2020

The Fifth Discipline

Peter M. Senge

There are two distinct types of feedback processes: reinforcing and balancing. Reinforcing (or amplifying) feedback processes are the engines of growth. Whenever you are in a situation where things are growing, you can be sure that reinforcing feedback is at work. Reinforcing feedback can also generate accelerating decline—a pattern of decline where small drops amplify themselves into larger and larger drops, such as the decline in bank assets when there is a financial panic.

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

The rebirthing of the second circuit is (relatively) complete when the Bottom Dog subject begins to seek, sincerely (not hypocritically) to win the approval of the Top Dogs. This, of course, only begins as play-acting; the skilled brainwasher knows that, and does not really object. With subtle reinforcement the play-acting becomes more and more genuine. Edmund Burke noted long ago, and every Method Actor knows, that you cannot make three dramatic gestures of rage in a political speech, without beginning to feel some real rage.

Tao Te Ching

Lao Tzu

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants. A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is. Thus the  Master is available to all people and doesn’t reject anyone. He is ready to use all situations and doesn’t waste anything. This is called embodying the light. What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher? What is a bad man but a good man’s job? If you don’t understand this, you will get lost, however intelligent you are. It is a great secret.

The Mysteries of the 3 September Quote Revealed--Who Is X?

 In completion of my 3 September quote of the unrevealed author and the unrevealed subject: 

X = Adolf Hitler

The author: Hannah Arendt, in her review of Hitler's Table Talk, written in 1951. 

And who else might it have been about? I will continue to leave that to your imagination. 

Thoughts of the Day: Friday 4 September 2020

 "Speaking is also a form of action."

— Hannah Arendt

"Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others." — Hannah Arendt

Asimov said that "science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom," and it applies all too well today. Society will never have shared opinions, but it must have shared facts!

--Garry Kasparov

Political Order and Political Decay

Francis Fukuyama

It is also reasonably clear that the existing structure of international institutions is inadequate to provide sufficient levels of cooperation, on issues from the drug trade to financial regulation to climate change.

David and Goliath

Malcolm Gladwell

What happens in wars between the strong and the weak when the weak side does as David did and refuses to fight the way the bigger side wants to fight, using unconventional or guerrilla tactics? The answer: in those cases, the weaker party’s winning percentage climbs from 28.5 percent to 63.6 percent. To put that in perspective, the United States’ population is ten times the size of Canada’s. If the two countries went to war and Canada chose to fight unconventionally, history would suggest that you ought to put your money on Canada.

Scarcity

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir

Scarcity is not just a physical constraint. It is also a mindset. When scarcity captures our attention, it changes how we think-whether it is at the level of milliseconds, hours, or days and weeks. By staying top of mind, it affects what we notice, how we weigh our choices, how we deliberate, and ultimately what we decide and how we behave.

Thought of the Day--Special Edition! A Challenge! Thursday 3 September 2020

Today, let's have a bit of fun with a contest. The quote--only one--will be a bit longer today, but juicy, I assure you. And about this quote, I pose three questions: 

1. About whom is this quote made? Where the subject's name was mention in the text, I have substituted 'X.' So, in other words, "who is X?" 
2. In addition to guessing whom X is, whom else might X be than your guess (or knowing answer)? Suggest one or more persons besides your best guess (or knowing answer) about who also might fit the criteria for X. (The quote is not by X but it's about X.) Extra credit for justifying your answers! 
3. Who wrote this about X? 

N.B. I have also provided alternative verb tenses to veil whether X is a contemporary or a historical figure. I am conceding, however, by keeping certain pronouns, that X is male. 

You can--if you wish--post your answers in the comments below or on the Facebook post of this blog. No cheating by using Google! 

Your prize? Accolades from me. A shout-out? Whatever, it's for fun--and edification. I will reveal the identity of X and the author of the piece quoted tomorrow in a post to follow this one. As to alternative identities of X, there is no single "right" answer (the piece was written about a single individual), but some answers will prove more imaginative and appropriately provocative and will be so judged. 

The quote: 

The problem of X’s charisma is relatively easy to solve. It is/was to a great extent identical with what [an observer] calls the “fanatical faith this man has/had in himself,” and it rests/rested on the well-known experiential fact that X must have realized early in his life, namely, that modern society in its desperate inability to form judgments will take every individual for what he considers himself and professes himself to be and will judge him on that basis. Extraordinary self-confidence and displays of self-confidence therefore inspire confidence in others; pretensions to genius waken the conviction in others that they are indeed dealing with a genius. This is merely the perversion of an old and justified rule of all good society according to which everyone has to be capable of showing what he is and of presenting himself in the proper light. The perversion occurs when the social role becomes, as it were, arbitrary, when it is completely separated from the actual human substance, indeed, when a role consistently played is unquestioningly accepted as the substance itself. In such an atmosphere any kind of fraud becomes possible because there appears to be no one at all left for whom the difference between fraud and authenticity matters in the least. People therefore fall prey to judgments apodictically expressed because the apodictic tone frees them from the chaos of an infinite number of totally arbitrary judgments. The crucial point is that not only is the apodictic quality of tone more convincing than the content of the judgment but also the content of the judgment, the object judged, becomes irrelevant. . . . . To assess correctly this phenomenon of charisma in X’s case we have to remind ourselves that in present-day society it is not really all that difficult to create an aura about oneself that will fool everyone—or just about everyone—who comes under its influence. In this respect X behaved no differently than have many less talented charlatans. It goes without saying that under these conditions the rule of a good upbringing that says one must not blow one’s own horn has to be ruthlessly put aside. The more that the vulgar practice of unbridled self-praise spreads in a society which for the most part still adheres to the rules of good upbringing, the more powerful its effect will be and the more easily that society can be convinced that only a truly “great man” who cannot be judged by normal standards could summon the courage to break rules as sacrosanct as those of good breeding. In other words, X holds/held a far greater fascination for generals and other members of good society than he did for the “old fighters” who, like him, came from the mob strata of society.

In the prevailing chaos that inability to form judgments created, however, X’s superiority went/goes considerably beyond the fascination, the mere “charisma,” that any charlatan can emanate. The awareness of the social possibilities that the modern inability to judge offered, and the ability to exploit them, are/were supported by the vastly more telling insight that in the modern world’s chaos of opinion the normal mortal is yanked about from one opinion to another without the slightest understanding of what distinguishes the one from the other. X knew from his own most personal experience what the maelstrom was like into which modern man is drawn and in which he changes his political or other “philosophy” from day to day on the basis of whatever options are offered him as he whirls helplessly about. He is himself that . . .  [news-follower] of whom he says that “in a city [in which] twelve [news sources] each report the same event differently … he will finally come to the conclusion that it is all nonsense.” What distinguished X from this . . .  [news-follower] and his desperation was/is simply that he had discovered one fine day that if you really hang onto any one of the current opinions and develop it with (as he was fond of saying) “ice-cold” consistency, then everything would somehow fall back into place again. X’s real superiority consists/consisted in the fact that under any and all circumstances he had an opinion and that his opinion always fit perfectly into his over-all “philosophy.” In this social context (and only in this context) superiority is indeed increased by fanaticism because obvious and demonstrable errors can no longer undermine it. What immediately reasserts itself after any demonstrated error is the fact that one not only has an opinion but also embraces that opinion and is therefore capable of judgment. And in politics, where one constantly has to act and therefore constantly has to make judgments, it is indeed altogether correct in a practical sense and more advantageous to reach any judgment and to pursue any course of action than not to judge and not to act at all.