The great political philosopher Hannah Arendt captured the sentiment [the beginning of the Cold War with the threat of nuclear war] brilliantly, with language that resonates eerily today. “Never has our future been more unpredictable,” she declared. “Never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest— forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”
Eventually, reality does correct such self-indulgence. But this reality hits home hardest not at the top of the capitalist heap, but at the bottom.
Collingwood wishes us to see that history is systematic knowledge. Its purpose is not to provide emotional satisfaction, but ‘to command assent’ (PH 73).
Now, if a person acquires the ability to express one kind of emotions and not another, the result will be that he knows the one kind to be in him, but not the other.
...as Socrates urged against Glaucon, the individual character considered in isolation from its environment is an abstraction, not a really existing thing. What a man does depends only to a limited extent on what kind of man he is. No one can resist the forces of his environment. Either he conquers the world or the world will conquer him.
It [the "loss" of China to the communists] caught this country [USA] psychologically unprepared. It was natural for a confused country to look for scapegoats and conspiracies; it was easier than admitting that there were things outside your control and that the world was an imperfect place in which to live.
Bluntly put, when democracy no longer delivers the goods, it will be consigned to the dustbin of history by an angry mob.
The practical principle which guides them to their opinions on the regulation of human conduct is the feeling in each person’s mind that everybody should be required to act as he, and those with whom he sympathizes, would like them to act.
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