A different kind of humanistic project in history is that of Machiavelli’s Discourses. He attempts to make history a science by extracting maxims from history: generalizations that are summaries of and lessons taught by the many individual events of the past. A typical example is “Dictatorship is advantageous in times of emergency.” Naturally, there are continual problems with the wealth of counterexamples to the maxims; Machiavelli attempts to explain them away individually, rather than saying that the maxims only hold true for the most part. His advice on what action to take in case of doubt is unhelpful: “In all discussions one should consider which alternative involves fewer inconveniences and should adopt this as the better course; for one never finds any issue that is clear cut and not open to question." To consider only the payoff, and not the probability of occurrence, will not lead to a satisfactory decision theory.
Courtesy of the competition delusion, the internet was colonised largely for institutional and private benefit.
The women and their Eucharist had to go. It may have started by altering John’s Gospel and getting rid of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. But the campaign against women and drugs would last for a very long time. As we will see toward the end of this investigation, it is a war that still very much continues to this day.
Cognition and creation are not only identical in the divine act of intuitus originarius (Kant); this identity is a demonstrable fact, independent of all revelation and present in man’s “duty of creation,” in which he must “endlessly repeat the creation of the universe,” a duty which can be proven by logical-positivist arguments. This is the logos which will take the place of mythos in a “future unitary science” and which will restore a world out of joint to the orderliness of a “system,” will lead man lost in anarchy back to the constraints of necessity.
Weaver was writing in the same monitory spirit as Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (1946) and Victor Klemperer’s study of fascist discourse, Lingua Tertii Imperii (1947). Taking their speeches as his material, Weaver disapproved of Burke’s rhetorical overkill, argumentative fluidity, and sense of expediency; he praised Lincoln’s lawyerly insistence on clearly stated definitions and principles.
Liberals, to put it in summary terms, took society to be competitive and conflicted. They distrusted power and questioned customary authority. They believed in human progress and social equality, with its requirement of civic respect for all. They had high expectations of political action.
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