I've been off my game for a couple days, distracted by the sacking of the U.S. Capital by the barbarians. I'm hoping no such further distractions come along. Hoping.
The supremacy of a dogma and the single aim of party line, of aggrandizement of the family or the junta of colonels, count more than the exemplar of tyranny in a single person. Absolutism is not a ruthless ruler, but a ruthless rule—and this we don’t easily remember, for our minds fix upon the figures of czars and crime lords. These images serve to keep the danger of tyranny projected onto Stalin, Genghis Khan and Al Capone, protecting us from the absolutism that can rule the psyche in the guise of fundamentalism in religion, bottom-lineism in business and progress in the sciences.
[M]uch of Keynes’ enthusiastic disposition came from his enduring faith in the power of ideas. He had been thinking about the economic miseries of the postwar world for a decade and had come to the conclusion that global calamity was a result of simple intellectual error. The problems were great, but they had straightforward and essentially painless solutions.
Was the Great Depression a "simple intellectual error?" Hard to believe, but had all of the wealth and productive capacity in the world suddenly disappeared?
The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this, at the rare moments when the stakes are on the table, may indeed prevent catastrophes, at least for the self.
No one in his right senses can believe—as certain German student groups recently theorized—that only when the government has been forced “to practice violence openly” will the rebels be able “to fight against this shit society (Scheissgesellschaft) with adequate means and destroy it.” (Quoted in Der Spiegel, February 10, 1969, p. 30.) This linguistically (though hardly intellectually) vulgarized new version of the old Communist nonsense of the thirties, that the victory of fascism was all to the good for those who were against it, is either sheer play-acting, the “revolutionary” variant of hypocrisy, or testifies to the political idiocy of “believers.” Except that forty years ago it was Stalin’s deliberate pro-Hitler policy and not just stupid theorizing that stood behind it.
Seems relevant, do you think?
It just takes the slightest effort to consciously hijack control and determine for ourselves how deeply we breathe, how often, and even stop it altogether for long stretches until our bodies have no choice but to wrest back control when we pass out. This makes breathwork the perfect wedge between our autonomic and somatic systems. And yet the control switch between consciousness and unconsciousness is so perfectly smooth that we don’t always notice what a feat it is.
But psychologists have shown that power corrupts our mental processes almost at once. When a feeling of power is induced in people, they are less likely to take others' viewpoint and more likely to center their thinking on themselves. The result is a reduced ability to comprehend how others see, think, and feel. Power, among other things, induces blindness toward others.
[H]ence also the coining of the new term I have used for my title: Personal Knowledge. The two words may seem to contradict each other: for true knowledge is deemed impersonal, universally established, objective. But the seeming contradiction is resolved by modifying the conception of knowing.
