Quotes: 30 November 2025
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, Secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.
We need to update the list of boogeymen for today to include George Soros, “the deep state,” etc. BTW, Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy. Some randomly thrown darts do strike the bull's eye now and then.
Apologies to the Grandchildren
Democracy was therefore too good for imperfect human beings: “So perfect a government is not for men.” “It is against natural order that the great number should govern and that the few should be governed.” [Quoting Rousseau].
“Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.” — Max Weber
As John Maynard Keynes once reminded his readers in the midst of World War II: “Anything we can actually do we can afford.”
Steve’s corollary: So choose carefully.
The explicit criterion of mature historical thought is nothing but historical fact itself the historian asks himself, ‘Does this fit in with everything I know about the world of facts, the nature of the case, the liability of the informant to error and mendacity, and so forth?’
“One of the differences between a good athlete and a great one is how quickly they recover,” says Mackenzie. “And our hypothesis is that we can train recovery.” It’s a game-changing notion. If you can tweak how the body deals with stress after exertion, then even resting becomes an active part of an athletic training program.
. . . .
An important aspect of the neural symbols that make up our cognition is that they not only register emotion and sensation together, but also the volume of those signals. An intense emotion or sensation is more likely to get picked up by the limbic librarian than one that doesn’t stand out. Insofar as the Wedge requires a person to be attentive to their sensations and feelings, learning to play with the volume levels is another tool we can use to subtly alter the way we experience the world. As counterintuitive as it may seem, sometimes diminishing our senses is the key to connecting outward.
Ancient thought could not even conceive of the individual’s soul life apart from the soul of the world.
The ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ are not wholly distinct realms. The whole discussion of ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ processes is set up as though the two were different species of fish kept in separate tanks. As I have argued elsewhere, the boundaries of consciousness are fluid, and elements can come and go from conscious awareness from millisecond to millisecond, rather as objects ‘appear’ and ‘disappear’ when a spotlight moves around a stage. And the field of consciousness at any moment in time has no sharp edges, but a ‘fringe’ around it where it meets the unconscious. This area on the edge of awareness is far more fruitfully creative than the centre of the field of consciousness. The essential point is whether what we ‘see’ is paralysed by focussed attention, such as the left hemisphere applies, or freed up by attention to the field as a whole, as is the case in the right hemisphere. Arguing about consciousness versus unconsciousness misses the point.
Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking.