The first entirely new notion brought in by the new age—the seventeenth-century idea of an unlimited progress, which after a few centuries became the most cherished dogma of all men living in a scientifically oriented world—seems intended to take care of the predicament: though one expects to progress further and further, no one seems ever to have believed in reaching a final absolute goal of truth.
The world appears in the mode of it-seems-to-me, depending on particular perspectives determined by location in the world as well as by particular organs of perception. This mode not only produces error, which I can correct by changing my location, drawing closer to what appears, or by improving my organs of perception with the help of tools and implements, or by using my imagination to take other perspectives into account; it also gives birth to true semblances, that is, to deceptive appearance, which I cannot correct like an error since they are caused by my permanent location on the earth and remain bound up with my own existence as one of the earth’s appearances.
Heidegger, whom Carnap singled out for attack, retorted by stating that philosophy and poetry were indeed closely related; they were not identical but sprang from the same source—which is thinking.
All laws, including the Bolshevist and Nazi laws, become a façade whose purpose is to keep the population constantly aware that the laws, no matter what their nature or origin, do not really matter.
What is this strange need to lead, and the equally strange one to follow? What is this will to power? Why do we pursue it? Must it always corrupt? Charismatic leaders cast a spell over their followers in the same way that a magician casts one over those he wants to enchant. The power of the image, of glamour, of one’s self-confidence, is at work in both—as it is in the confidence trickster. The medium is the imagination, whether in its traditional forms or in its new electronic version.
Weariness and compromise—the workings of the Mixmaster “market”—have puréed all Nixon’s separate virtues to an unoffending mush.
Some people are going to be left behind, and societies with rapidly widening inequalities can’t be politically stable for long.
