Commanding hope has three components— honest, astute, and powerful hope— that combine to help create this virtuous circle.
People with a prudent temperament, in contrast, are fundamentally cautious. They have an acute sense of the dangers lurking in the world, so their main aspiration is safety. They tend to be more skeptical about human agency and more motivated by fear, and they’re apt to think recklessness and profligacy tempt fate. But their perspective isn’t necessarily bleak: because they’re sensitive to the fragility of order and to the interdependence of things around them, the world often provokes in these people feelings of awe and reverence.
What does the world around me mean? What does its imagery symbolically represent? What is it saying?
The majority of the executive positions would be held by non-Nazi conservatives, who would be in charge of foreign policy, finance, labor, and agriculture. “We’re boxing Hitler in,” said the leader of one right-wing party. “We’ve hired him for our act,” said Papen, who was slated to become vice chancellor. Such statements reveal not only an inane optimism in the light of what was to come but also a foolish arrogance that was blind to the way power functioned in a mass democracy.
For Kant, God is an “Idea of reason” and as such for us: to think God and speculate about a hereafter is, according to Kant, inherent in human thought insofar as reason, man’s speculative capacity, necessarily transcends the cognitive faculties of his intellect: only what appears and, in the mode of it-seems-to-me, is given to experience can be known; but thoughts also “are,” and certain thought-things, which Kant calls “ideas,” though never given to experience and therefore unknowable, such as God, freedom, and immortality, are for us in the emphatic sense that reason cannot help thinking them and that they are of the greatest interest to men and the life of the mind.
“Brainwashing,” George Romney would call it [information from the Administration about the Vietnam War] in 1968, and be immediately jumped on by all sorts of people, like Robert Kennedy, who had been brainwashed themselves and never known it or admitted it.
