"Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount."
- A Chinese proverb made famous in the West by Winston Churchill.
Here we shall have to concern ourselves, not for the first time, with the concept of history, but we may be able to reflect on the oldest meaning of this word, which, like so many other terms in our political and philosophical language, is Greek in origin and derived from historein, to inquire in order to tell how it was —legein ta eonta in Herodotus. But the origin of this verb is again Homer (Iliad XVIII) where the noun histor (“historian,” as it were) occurs, and that Homeric historian is the judge. If judgment is our faculty for dealing with the past, the historian is the inquiring man who by relating it sits in judgment over it. If that is so, we may reclaim our human dignity, win it back, as it were, from the pseudo-divinity named History of the modern age, without denying history’s importance but denying its right to being the ultimate judge.
Keynes could examine patterns of human behavior and study trends in the way people actually made decisions; that was science, a subject of meaningful inquiry. But he could not investigate rationality itself. Rationality simply was—or was not.
When perceived stress level is very high, the vagus nerve slows heart rate, circulation, and organ functions. This is how our reptilian and mammalian ancestors evolved the ability to “play dead” hundreds of millions of years ago, to conserve energy and deflect aggression when under attack by predators.
Bureaucratisation and capitalism, though not necessarily themselves the best of bedfellows, and at times perhaps in conflict, are each manifestations of the will to power, and each is linked to Protestantism.
And in his celebrated critique of Max Weber’s separation of fact and value, Strauss traces Weber’s thought forward from its benign origins in neo-Kantianism to a dangerously judgment-free social science. “In following this movement toward its end we shall inevitably reach a point beyond which the scene is darkened by the shadow of Hitler.” Weber’s commitment to objectivity, which translated into a refusal to make value judgments, was a direct path, Strauss maintained, to Nazi nihilism.
Stop repeating what never worked in the first place. Stand back and ask for a new solution. Stop struggling at the level of the problem—the answer never lies there. Work on your own stuckness. Don’t worry about the other person. When the old stresses are triggered, walk away. See righteous anger for what it really is—destructive anger dressed up to sound positive. Rebuild the bonds that have become frayed. Take on more of the burden than you think you deserve. Stop attaching so much weight to being right. In the grand scheme of things, being right is insignificant compared with being happy.
So self-betrayal—this act of violating my own sensibilities toward another person—causes me to see that person or persons differently, and not only them but myself and the world also. When I ignore a sense to apologize to my son, for example, I might start telling myself that he’s really the one who needs to apologize, or that he’s a pain in the backside, or that if I apologize, he’ll just take it as license to do what he wants.
