.. a neighbour of yours ;-)

Stalemate - both have sufficient force to carry out a really Ugly scenario, and neither group may be accused of, lack of Will (you know - that stuff via which G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate fame: places hand in candle flame, says, Of course it hurts; the trick is.. not to mind.)

The only collective sense I can derive from all these events - from the usual hit/run to the more suspenseful hostage-type ploys is, a Y2K acting-out of the theses in Karl Popper's, The Open Society and its Enemies \ufffd 1950 [ad interim copyright granted 1946]. Its face-plate quotation is:

It will be seen ... that the Erewhonians are a meek and long-suffering people, easily led by the nose, and quick to offer up common sense at the altar of logic, when a philosopher arises among them ... Samuel Butler

In his Preface he says,

If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, the wish to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our ivilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason. Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whose defence civilization depends, and to divide them. The responsibility for this tragic and possibly fatal division becomes ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in ourcriticism of what admittedly is a part of our intellectual heritage. By our reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help to destroy it all.

The book is a critical introduction to the philosophy of politics and of history, and an examination of some of the principles of social reconstruction. Its aim and the line of approachare indicated in the Introduction. Even where it looks back into the past, its problems are the problems of our own time; and I have tried hard to state them as simply as I could, in the hope to clarify matters which concern us all.

Although the book presupposes nothing but open-mindedness in the reader, its object is not so much to popularize the questions treated as to solve them. In an attempt, however, to serbe both of these purposes, I hace confined all matters of more specialized interest to Notes which have been collected at the end of the book.

Christchurch, N.Z.
April 1944

It is obv a Tour de Force, with chapter titles such as, Heraclitus, Totalitarian Justice, Leadership, Utopianism, Socialism, Capitalism, Hegel, The Open Society ... No person who could achieve the Presidency of the US via the Language-fucking that is Required here - is apt to have read such IMO (John & Robert Kennedy excepted - wonder re Bill C. as Rhodes Scholar, though). Perhaps some Euro leaders du jour would stand a better probability, simply because their education is much more apt to be ept.

In any event, today we are living out this Title just as portentously as when Popper first addressed the ideas for this book in 1938, following the Anschluss. He had plenty of time to refine and edit. Only by reading it can anyone assess his performance in attempting compaction of a liberal arts Western education into a useable synopsis - in pp 732. [!!] I doubt that any compression algorithm can produce a Readers Digest version for the attention-span deprived.

Dubya + cabal of course, neither would nor could - manage one page, despite Popper's eschewing of academese for plainest possible English Language. This book won't save us, but I think that if homo-sap are to be saved from our collective cant, hypocrisy and Damnable theologically-fueled spite -?- Popper's words in hindsight, would adequately explain "how it was managed".


And so it goes,

Ashton