Combining the positions on the left end of each scale yields a worldview emphasizing moral relativism, the power of circumstances over choice, the essential similarity of all people, responsibility to others, and resistance to authority— a common leftist perspective.
Politicians and commentators often say that we’re all simply going to have to adjust to the “new normal” of a climate-changed world. But there’s no normal anymore, new or otherwise.
[Alfred] Adler’s view that neurosis springs from feelings of inadequacy, inferiority. But what is more important is that he recognises the vital importance of the human will in mental illness. Freud’s psychology is virtually will-less, like Hume’s; the human will is very small and unimportant compared to the vast forces of the subconscious; curing a patient consists in somehow reconciling him to these forces, persuading him to stop resisting them, attempting to repress them.
The historical achievement of liberalism is a great one, and even its severest critics would not systematically raze all its monuments. That these great deeds were accomplished by men acting, often, out of self-delusion means only that we are looking at the history of men—the same could be said of any school of thought that led to large actions in the world. One cannot even indulge in “hypothetical history” by saying a different course would have been a better one. This is our history, its good and bad intermixed; we cannot choose another.
There was a deep element of make-believe in such self-conscious adoption of a style. “Courtly love was a social utopia. It was the code word for a new and better society, a society that was unreal and could exist only in the poetic imagination.”
Meaning perception [from Alfred North Whitehead] is the glue that holds these separate items together to form a whole and allows them to make sense. It is a form of Schwaller de Lubicz’s ‘intelligence of the heart’ and Bergson’s ‘intuition’, which allows us to get into things, to know their ‘insides’.
