Category: Thought

A common mistake is that the conclusions of the plain unlettered man differ from those of economists in being more immediately founded on observed facts and less on deduction. The truth is that the plain unlettered man is more prone to rely on deduction from unproved hypotheses than the economist is. All classes must equally use deduction, because it is only by this logical process that we form any conclusion about the future effect of any present cause. Drawing the conclusion that rain will follow a certain direction of the wind with certain appearances of the clouds is an act of logical deduction. The main point in which men’s logical methods differ lies in the care with which hypotheses are formed by induction from observed facts, and the readiness of men to test them. Now it is the plain man who is most prone to form hasty generalizations from insufficient facts, to consider the conclusions which he thence deduces as final, and to be blind to all facts which do not tally with his theory.

Simon Newcomb, Principles of Political Economy, 1886, p. 40

‘Speaking truth to power’ is not easy when you support that power. Perhaps this is the reason why so few Western historians are willing to tell the whole truth about state crimes during this century.

Ralph Raico, “The Taboo Against Truth: Holocausts and Historians,” Liberty, September 1989.

As we explore the world of thoughts our changing understandings change its shape. Things we thought we knew disappear as unexpected beings take their place, and we move among different and higher platforms of understanding. The real secret of philosophy has perhaps always been the joy of escaping into this wonderland and playing in it freely, a joy that has even tempted sensible men to give up their practical lives. The necessarily unphilosophical State has never been able to understand the temptation of a liberating joy as anything but disloyalty.

Corey Abel, review of Liberty, Individuality, and Democracy in Jorge Luis Borges by Alejandra Salinas (Lanham MD, Lexington Books: 2017), in Voegelinview.

But now we come to the most important thing. Those diverse projects or programs of life which our fancy elaborates, and among which our will, another psychic mechanism can freely choose, are not presented to us as looking all alike; a strange voice emerging from some intimate and secret depth of our own calls on us to choose one of these and to bar the others. All these programs, please note, are presented to us as possible — we may have the ability to be one kind of person or another, but one and only one appears to us as the one which we have to be. This is the strangest and most mysterious ingredient in man. On the one hand, he is free, he is not forced to be any single thing as is the star; and yet in the face of this freedom something always rises with a certain character of necessity about it, as thought saying to us, “You are able to be whatever you want; but only if you choose this or that specific pattern will you be what you have to be.’ That is to say, among his various possible beings each man always finds one which is his genuine and authentic being. The voice which calls him to that authentic being is what we call ‘vocation.’ But the majority of men devote themselves to silencing that voice of the vocation and refusing to hear it.

Ortega y Gasset, Man and Crisis (Mildred Adams, trans., 1958), p. 179.

Descendants of the theologians of the Middle Ages, and heirs of the nation of fools so carefully elaborated by our old university; with our minds full of the formulas of our lawyers, and the dogmas of our priests, and moulded by a memoria technica education; instead of being brought up to observe facts, we are accustomed to think in the abstract, so that in the sciences we take energy, motion, matter, race, species, &c. — which are simply convenient terms for classification — for realities, having an existence of their own.
If in regard to such matters as these we commit such errors, we do worse when we enter upon the examination of social questions. We create for ourselves entities, such as order, morality, religion, society, and then, on the pretext of defending order, morality, religion, and society, the stronger crush down the weaker. In the same way as Calino discovers that the forest prevents him seeing the trees, behind these words we no longer see the individuals without whom, nevertheless, there would be neither society, religion, morality, nor order amongst men.

Yves Guyot, Prostitution Under the Regulation System (Edgar Beckit Truman, M.D., F.C.S., trans., 1884), p. 2.

Illustration is a detail from a caricature by the great French artist André Gill (1840-1885).

“We should be very jealous of who speaks for science, particularly in our age of rapidly expanding technology. A misinformed or uninformed public can stop anything even when it is clearly in society’s benefit. How can the public be educated? I do not know the specifics, but of this I am certain: The public will remain uninformed and uneducated in science until the media professionals decide otherwise, until they stop quoting charlatans and quacks, and until respected scientists speak up.”

Dixy Lee Ray, Trashing the Planet, 1990

To accept words instead of things, to content oneself with words, to dispute about words: such is the history of all man’s intellectual aberrations. He is driven to this by two opposite tendencies: need of certainty, and indolence in inquiry.
The result of this is that he lumps together a whole order of phenomena, more or less connected, by a word more or less expressive and precise. He comprehends in this word, creatures of all kinds; and when he has once contracted the habit of repeating this word to himself or to others, he no longer observes the facts of the case: he only attaches his belief to the word.
As soon as the word is pronounced in his presence, some of his cerebral cells begin to act; and by reflex action he utters a series of incoherent but already-formed ideas upon the question which is before us.

Yves Guyot, Prostitution Under the Regulation System (Edgar Beckit Truman, M.D., F.C.S., trans., 1884), pp. 1–2.

Illustration is a detail from a caricature by the French artist André Gill (1840-1885).

“Repeatedly over the past few years the American public has been subjected to a litany of catastrophes — to predictions of impending disaster that are claimed to be unique to modern civilization. The oceans are dying, the atmosphere is poisoned, the earth itself is losing its capacity to support life. . . . The anticipated catastrophes are our own fault, of course, blamed on the greedy and perfidious nature of modern man.

“Well, it’s all pretty heady stuff, but is it true? As with so many issues that involve technology, the answer is yes — and no — probably rather more ‘no’ than ‘yes.’”

Dixy Lee Ray, Trashing the Planet, 1990

All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.

Co-authors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander of “Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture,” The Inquirer (August 9, 2017), an article that caused a huge backlash against Dr. Wax at her institution, the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Immediately following the above-quoted passage, the article continued:

The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants. These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans. If the bourgeois cultural script — which the upper-middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach — cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all.

Would the re-embrace of bourgeois norms by the ordinary Americans who have abandoned them significantly reduce society’s pathologies? There is every reason to believe so. . . .

Neither government nor municipal monopolies are novelties; they are antiques. . . . They are not indicative of evolution, but of retrogression.

Yves Guyot, Where and Why Public Ownership Has Failed (H. F. Baker, trans., 1914), p. 397.

Illustration is a detail from a caricature by the great French artist André Gill (1840-1885).