How vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes...
— Hannah Arendt
Essences cannot be localized. Human thought that gets hold of them leaves the world of the particular and goes out in search of something generally meaningful, though not necessarily universally valid. Thinking always “generalizes,” squeezes out of many particulars—which, thanks to the de-sensing process, it can pack together for swift manipulation—whatever meaning may inhere. Generalization is inherent in every thought, even though that thought is insisting on the universal primacy of the particular. In other words, the “essential” is what is applicable everywhere, and this “everywhere” that bestows on thought its specific weight is spatially speaking a “nowhere.”
Particularly so in light of the seemingly reactionary alternative origin to the age of modern philosophy Benjamin proposes. Ultimately, for him, only God—an event as divine as the phenomenon of speech itself—can supply true salvation. Just as language—as the foundation of all meaningful access to the world—cannot in Benjamin’s view be of human origin, the healing shock of the perception of truth (in “pure language”) cannot be, either. Like Wittgenstein, Benjamin insists time and again that the miracle of language cannot be explained in language. At most, its essence can be shown through particular linguistic modes of representation.
The underlying theme of every essay in Between Past and Future is that the great Western philosophic-political tradition has been ruptured, and so definitively ruptured that its authority can never be restored.
It’s strange that in America we have not learned the lesson that hasty, unplanned development can provoke a backlash. After all, the country has experienced several, most notably the 1930s Dust Bowl, the greatest ecological disaster in North American history. The event is seared in the American imagination, depicted in novels and captured in movies. The bitter tale of desperate Dust Bowl migrants inspired John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath—describing the plight of people who could be called AFarmerica’s first climate refugees. And it is a story of human action causing a natural reaction.
We just read (aloud) Grapes of Wrath this fall: a great book.
First, in human understanding, facts do not come alive until the ideas internal to them are grasped. Second, the appropriate question to ask of human activities is not whether they are true or false, but what they mean.
“The rentier class.” Keynes meant by this the people who made money simply by owning something that others needed, and charging for the use of it: this is rent in its economic meaning. Rent goes to people who are not creators of value, but predators on the creation and exchange of value. So “the euthanasia of the rentier class” was Keynes’s way of trying to describe a revolution without revolution, a reform of capitalism in his time, toward whatever subsequent post-capitalist system might follow.
If, in the selection of members of the élite, there existed a condition of perfectly free competition, so that each individual could, without any obstacle, rise just as high in the social scale as his talents and ambition permitted, the élite could be presumed to include, at every moment and in the right order, just those persons best fitted for membership in it. Under such circumstances—which [Alfredo] Pareto seems to imagine after the analogy of the theoretical free market of classical economics, or the biological arena of the struggle for survival—society would remain dynamic and strong, automatically correcting its own weaknesses. However, a condition of this sort is never found in reality. There are always obstacles, or “ties” as Pareto calls them, that interfere with the free circulation of individuals up and down the social scale.
Cf. Collingwood on "the ruling class" in his "The Three Laws of Politics."
Psychopathy is part of the so-called dark triad of traits. And as it turns out, the other two, narcissism and Machiavellianism, also seem to describe many of the traits we associate with the grifter.
