Autocracy
It is a terrible spectacle when irrationalism becomes popular. One feels that disaster is imminent, a disaster such as the one-sided overvaluation of reason could never bring about. The overvaluation of reason can be comical in its optimistic pedantry and can be made to look ridiculous by the deeper powers of life. But it does not evoke catastrophe
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On the one side, Havel wrote, was the “sterile puritanism” of the regime and, on the other, “unknown young people who wanted no more than … to play the music they enjoyed.” Dissidence arose from heeding “life, in its essence,” which “moves toward plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, and self-organization.”
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