In Keynes’ thinking, an event could be objectively probable in 1920, even if, looking back from 1922, it never actually came to pass. And it is the objective probability—not the subsequent course of events—that matters for human reason. There is a difference between being rational and being right.
According to objective idealism, there is a world out there, outside the volitional control of ego-consciousness, but it is a world constituted by transpersonal experiences. These transpersonal experiences—objective from the perspective of the ego—impinge on ego-consciousness in two ways, creating autonomous imagery in both cases. Hence, according to Jung’s hardly disguised metaphysical views, all existence can be reduced to—i.e. explained in terms of—phenomenality.
This book is not about “explaining consciousness,” nor is it in any way a “scientific” account of the brain or our interior world. There are many of these, excellent ones written by abler hands than mine. On the contrary, one of my motives in writing this book is to argue that the current monopoly on consciousness by scientists and academic philosophers is unfounded, and that a whole history of thought about consciousness and its possible evolution is left out of their “official” accounts.
With successful legislative and policy achievements, Franklin Roosevelt’s initial term had transformed the politics of upheaval into a politics of hope.
Mankind owes its existence not to the dreams of the humanists nor to the reasoning of the philosophers and not even, at least not primarily, to political events, but almost exclusively to the technical development of the Western world.
One-party dictatorships, of either the fascist or communist type, are not totalitarian. Neither Lenin nor Mussolini was a totalitarian dictator, nor even knew what totalitarianism really meant. Lenin’s was a revolutionary one-party dictatorship whose power lay chiefly in the party bureaucracy, which Tito tries to replicate today. Mussolini was chiefly a nationalist and, in contrast to the Nazis, a true worshiper of the State, with strong imperialist inclinations; if the Italian army had been better, he probably would have ended as an ordinary military dictator, just as Franco, who emerged from the military hierarchy, tries to be in Spain, with the help given and the constraint imposed by the Catholic Church.
The project [assessing the effect of environmental degradation on state failure] was also handicapped by the underlying assumption—inescapable, given its methodology—that the past is a good guide to the future. One of the most frustrating things for researchers in the social sciences, as Alan Greenspan’s remarks suggest, is the tendency for apparently strong associations between factors—like the association between money supply and the inflation rate—to weaken and vanish over time.
Values are meaningless without stories to bring them to life and engage us on a personal level.
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