Virtue is happy to pay the price of limited power for the blessing of being together with other men; fear is the despair over the individual impotence of those who, for whatever reason, have refused to “act in concert.”
Strictly speaking, only knowing can have a goal, and Broch was always primarily concerned with a highly practical goal, whether ethical, religious, or political. Thinking does not have a real goal, and unless thinking finds its meaning in itself, it has no meaning at all. (This, of course, applies only to the activity of thinking itself, not to writing down thoughts, an act that has far more to do with artistic and creative processes than with thinking in itself. The writing down of thoughts has in fact both goal and purpose; like all producing activities, it has a beginning and an end.)
Through those changes, the idea property has kept its role in conservative thought as a stabilizer of society providing people—to use Hegel’s term—with “personality,” a capacity for effective action in civic life they would otherwise lack.
Memory for names may be developed just as one would develop any other faculty of the mind, or part of the body, i. e., by Attention and Practice.
When we act hypocritically, then, it's often not that we're ignoring or deliberately disregarding our beliefs and morals; it's merely that our short-term concerns have momentarily triumphed.
A “Nash equilibrium” is what happens when everyone makes their best move, given that all the other players are making their best moves from that Nash equilibrium—everyone goes to Craigslist, because that’s their individually best move given that everyone else is going to Craigslist. A “Pareto optimum” is any situation where it’s impossible to make every actor better off simultaneously, like “Cooperate/Cooperate” in the Prisoner’s Dilemma—there’s no alternative outcome to Cooperate/Cooperate that makes both agents better off. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a coordination problem because the sole Nash equilibrium of Defect/Defect isn’t Pareto-optimal; there’s an outcome, Cooperate/Cooperate, that both players prefer, but aren’t reaching.
The program of a political party declares in favor of “law and order.” But what law and order, and whose law and order? All sovereignty, the Constitutions say, is vested in the people. But the most liberal parliament and the most despotic Bonapartist equally claim to respect the principle of popular sovereignty.
“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”
Kurt Vonnegut
