Sublime

The title of Dewey’s first lecture in China was “Democratic Developments in America.” More than a thousand attended, and soon the American was being hailed as a “second Confucius.”

I went back to [Hannah] Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and reread sections of it. I was looking for a clue as to what she meant by “the banality of evil,” which she defines as a “kind of thoughtlessness.” I guess I think of evil as in some way connected with self-deception. —Morris

When a State is threatened by serious dangers, the people frequently succeeds in selecting the citizens who are the most able to save

Hannah Arendt’s warning that “clichés, stock phrases, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against a claim on our thinking.”

By a general act of will freedom of thought has been put out of function, because many give up thinking as free individuals, and are guided by the collective to which they belong. … With the sacrifice of independence of thought we have—and how could it be otherwise—lost faith in truth. Our intellectual-emotional life is disorganized. The

Arendt was right to assume the worst of him. In April 1933, all doubts about Heidegger were blown away when he accepted the post of rector of Freiburg University, a job that required him to enforce the new Nazi laws.

It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.