Technological prowess and individual sacrifice were no match for national incoherence. The virus exploited every fault line, every division of class, race, geography, and politics, every declining social and economic indicator, every institutional weakness, every blind spot and bias. The failure began at the top, where it was least forgivable and most devastating, but it extended to the whole society.
We speak well, in prose, only in order to say what we mean: the matter is prior to the form. This priority, no doubt, is rather logical than temporal. The matter does not exist as a naked but fully formed thought in our minds before we fit it with a garment of words. It is only in some dark and half-conscious way that we know our thoughts before we come to express them. Yet in that obscure fashion they are already within us ; and, rising into full consciousness as we find the words to utter them, it is they that determine the words, not vice versa.
At this time in history at least, God is too big and social justice is too small to serve as a solidarity-restoring ideal.
The Great Depression, which is generally dated from the Wall Street Crash of October 1929, was a consequence of structural imbalances in the world economy, a rigid system of fixed exchange rates, beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism, and errors of monetary and fiscal policy.
In reviewing this rapid sketch of the influence of mathematics throughout European history, we see that it had two great periods of direct influence upon general thought, both periods lasting for about two hundred years. The first period was that stretching from Pythagoras to Plato, when the possibility of the science, and its general character, first dawned upon the Grecian thinkers. The second period comprised the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of our modern epoch.
“Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial, really,” I expound. “It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test’s always your own serenity. If you don’t have this when you start and maintain it while you’re working you’re likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.”
