Reply #50: "sort of like planning how to stop an armored division with a Civil War musket."

[tom_paine]

Yep. That and worse. Terrific post, arendt.

Consider this, though. I will make a disclaimer and say this is not my idea, but Freidrich Reck-Malleczewen's in his book "Diary of a Man in Despair" who lived during a recent time of great anti-intellectualism devised and maintained by the same basic types of people as the Bushies who are devising and maintaining our current nightmare descent into Unreason. Which is to say 1930s Germany.

Malleczewen hypothesized that Nazidom and by extension brutal human authoritarian evil, was some sort of psychic pustule that had to burst every so often in every society, though not necessarily all at the same time.

And yes, in my lifetime, still far from over, we have gone from realtively rational to deconstructed postmodern virtual slaves, living in a society in which there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as lies, only they who have the loudest megaphone.

But I won't reiterate and rephrase what you have already said so well.

But what do you think about Reck-Malleczewen's hypothesis? Could this jus be a feature of primate nature? This psychic pustule, now swollen by decades of rationality and reality enforced peace by nuclear arms, could it be ready for it's periodic explosion again?

Are we are simply ready, collectively, so ready to strip naked paint our faces blue and go on a mostrously huge killing rampage, metaphorically and perhaps literally speaking of our society, that we can't shed our rationality fast enough? Add to that the phenomena which says that those sorts of people are the kind that Bushies and Nazis prefer to rule, being easier to lead, mold, deceive and steal from. Not to mention aim their unquestioningly obedient and unreasoning selves at whatever enemy they prefer, foreign or domestic.

I am coming around, fatalistic as is is, to Malleczewen's conclusion, having lived through a kinder and gentler version of what he lived through (thank God for some favors...call it rationality's last gift to the last enlightenment-based generation, that our Bushie Hitlers have to take this slow and tortuous kinder and gentler course, relatively-speaking, because rationality and our Constitution, Declaration, and Bill of Rights made a more aggressive, violent course impossible for the moment).

It just may be our nature that these psychic pustules, ironically brought on by the advancement of peace and reason, will eventually cause the primate line to undergo what the reptilian line did 65 million years ago.

Just something to ponder, and a voice from history long past and long dead. A man who would very much understand and feel at home in Bush-Occupied Amerika, especially because it is so much kinder and gentler than the place he came from (for the moment...just wait until the pustule bursts)