“The mass-man has no attention to spare for reasoning; he learns only in his own flesh.”-Jose Ortega y’ Gassett, The Revolt of the Masses (1930)
The Growing Challenges of Anti-Reason
Nothing could be more obvious. In present-day American life, anti-reason is not merely in vogue. It also functions as a de facto national belief system. In uniquely retrograde instances, as we may witness in our daily politics, it can override entire centuries of intellectual progress.
All too quickly, it can become de rigeur.
There are pertinent facts and prominently grinding humiliations. Though many years have passed since the core scientific triumphs of Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Descartes and Einstein, conspiracy theories often still preempt established premises of logic, mathematics and science. For the most part, these theories are conspicuously imbecilic.
So what is going on?
It is, to begin, an absurd state of affairs. Credo quia absurdum, warned the ancient philosophers. “I believe because it is absurd.” What we are experiencing today is nothing less shameless than an institutionalized triumph of absurdity. This “victory” is not merely difficult to explain. It is manifestly pervasive, insufficiently challenged and unambiguously lethal.
There is more. There are assorted relevant chronologies. In America, the absurd triumph of “mass man” did not originate with the rabidly incoherent Trump presidency. Nonetheless, that presidential celebration of thoughtlessness functioned as a corrosive accelerant of irremediable national decline. And (plainly) a disjointed Trump presidency could happen once again.
The evidence is compelling. We Americans have already made witting peace with governance by unwisdom, conspiracy and cliché. Altogether unhidden, there reigns in sectors of all American states a once-unimaginable sovereignty of the unqualified. The only plausible outcome of such still-accumulating national defilements can be expanded belligerent nationalism, enlarged human sufferings and an authentically existential despair.
The core questions keep coming. How did we even manage to get to such a low point?[1] Where are we now likely heading?
There are plausible answers to these questions. Going forward, all questions should be considered as interrelated matters of chronology. That is, they should be considered “in time.”
The Revolt of the Masses and its Bitter Legacy
It has been almost one hundred years since Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y’ Gasset published The Revolt of the Masses (Le Rebelion de las Masas, 1930). A prescient indictment of anti-Reason, and an immediate forerunner of modern classical works by the German scholars Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers,[2] Ortega was especially concerned about Europe’s growing fragmentation of learning. Witnessing a world that was abandoning the traditional goal of broadly-educated or “whole” human beings, he worried about a worldwide future in which there would be more capable scientists than ever before, but where these scientists were otherwise unexceptional, without any wider embrace of erudition.
Though generally ignored, these observations were seminal. Among other things, the prophetic philosopher foresaw “educated” societies in which even the proud holders of impressive university degrees were “conscientiously ignorant” of everything outside their own vocational bailiwicks. Unwittingly, of course, Ortega had anticipated the present-day United States. Here, even in our oft-vaunted “advanced society,” the most exquisitely trained physicians, lawyers, accountants and engineers typically reason at the same limiting levels of analysis as technicians, carpenters, business owners or office workers.
It’s time for candor. “Professional” education in the United States has managed to supersede everything that does not ostentatiously focus on making money. The adverb here is vital in this description, because the overriding lure of wealth in America remains the presumed admiration it can elicit from others. As we ought already to have learned from Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759): “The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world….At the thought of this, his heart seems to swell and dilate itself within him, and he is fonder of his wealth, upon this account, than for all the other advantages it procures him.”[3]
The Pubic Mind and its Shapers
Almost by definition, any American concerns for intellectual or historical issues per se have become extraneous. This does not mean, however, that our strenuous national efforts at improving professional education have been successful or productive. On the contrary, as we witness the multiple daily technical failures of American democracy, our beleaguered polity is failing on multiple fronts.
For many reasons, many of them overlapping or even synergistic, this has been a lamentable retrogression. Above all, it has impaired this country’s capacity to sustain an enviable or even minimally credible democracy. Though Thomas Jefferson had already understood that proper human governance requires a purposeful acquaintance with historical and sociological learning, Americans now inhabit a country where the president could say unashamedly, “I love the poorly educated.” Significantly, this perverse preference of Donald J. Trump did not emerge ex nihilo, out of nothing. Moreover, it did nothing to inhibit the prospect of another run for the White House.
It is a portentous but credible echo of Third Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels: “Intellect rots the brain.”[4]
Ortega y’Gasset had a specific name for this generally defiling intellectual deformation. More exactly, he called it “The Barbarism of ‘Specialisation.”[5] Earlier, and in somewhat similar fashion, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the “educated philistine.”[6] Both Ortega and Nietzsche recognized the irony that a society could become progressively better educated in various sub-fields of human knowledge and simultaneously become less and less cultured, less and less truly civilized.[7] In this regard, the German philosopher placed appropriate conceptual blame on what he preferred to call the “herd.”[8] For his part, the kindred Spanish thinker cast his particular indictment on the “mass.”
Whatever the terminological differences, both sets of ideas were centered on the same basic critique; that is, that individuals had been casting aside the necessary obligation to think for themselves, and had, thereby, surrendered indispensable analytic judgments to “crowds.”[9]
Barbarism in the Trump White House
Today, both ideas can shed some useful light on American democracy, a system of governance under increasing assault by former US President Donald J. Trump. To the extent that American education has become rampantly vocational – that is, oriented toward more and more “pragmatic” kinds of specialization – the wisdom of Ortega y’Gasset and others is worth probing with ever-increasing care. The “barbarous” impact of specialization foreseen earlier by philosophers is now magnified by the injurious effects of worldwide disease pandemic.
This unwelcome magnification will need to be countered if American democracy is merely able to survive.[10]
But analysis should begin at the beginning. Inter alia, it is a discomfiting beginning. Americans now inhabit a society so numbingly fragmented and rancorous that even their most sincere melancholy is contrived. Wallowing in the mutually-reinforcing twilights of submission and conformance, We the people have strayed dangerously far from any meaningful standards of serious learning. In consequence, though still a nation with extraordinary scientific, medical and commercial successes, the American public is plainly ill-equipped to judge candidates for high political office.[11]
As we have seen in the case of Donald J. Trump, utterly ill-equipped.
Surveying still-mounting damages of the recent Trump presidency,[12] some of which are synergistic or “force multiplying,” could anything be more apparent?
The grievously baneful selection of Donald J. Trump in 2016 was anything but a cultural aberration. It was, rather, the plausible outcome of an electorate relentlessly driven and even defined by “mass.” Without any real or compelling reasons, voting Americans freely abandoned the once-residual elements of Jeffersonian good citizenship.
Together with the unceasing connivance of assorted criminals, charlatans and fools, many of them occupants of the previous US Government’s most senior positions, a lonely American mass now bears core responsibility for allowing the demise of a once- enviable democratic ethos. To expect any sudden improvements to emerge from among this homogenized mass (e.g., by continuously making the citizens more particularly aware of this former president’s manifold derelictions) would be to overestimate its inclinations. Though truth is always exculpatory, there are times when it yields to various tangible forms of self-delusion.
“What the mass once learned to believe without reasons,” queries Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, “who could ever overthrow with reasons?”
High Living or High Thinking?
There will be a heavy price to pay for America’s still-expanding ascendancy of mass. Any society so willing to abjure its rudimentary obligations toward dignified learning – toward what American Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson had once called “high thinking” – is one that should never reasonably expect to survive.[13]
There is more. Treating formal education as a narrowly instrumental obligation (“one should get better educated in order to get a better paying job”), Americans now more easily accept flagrantly empty witticisms as profundities (“We will build a beautiful wall;” “Barbed wire can be beautiful;” “The moon is part of Mars;” “Testing for corona virus only increases disease;” “Just one percent of Covid19 victims have symptoms,” etc., etc), and consult genuinely challenging ideas only rarely.
Always, the dire result of anti-Reason is more-or-less predictable; that is, a finely trained work force that manages to get a particular “job” done, but displays (simultaneously) nary a hint of worthwhile learning, commendable human understanding or simple compassion. Concerning this last absence, lack of empathy is not directly related to the “barbarisms of specialization,” but it does generally exhibit some tangible nurturance from literature, art and/or “culture.” Incontestably, the Trump White House was not “only” indifferent to basic human rights and public welfare,[14] it quite literally elevated personal animus to highest possible significations.
This is especially marked where such animus is most thoroughly pedestrian.
Intentionally mispronouncing the Democrat vice-presidential candidate’s first name was a small but glaring example of Donald Trump’s selected level of competitive political discourse. By its very nature, this demeaning level is better suited to a first-grade elementary school classroom. It is anything but appropriate to presidential discourse.
There are even much wider ramifications of gratuitous rancor. When transposed to the vital arena of international relations, the former president’s elevation of belligerent nationalism has a long and persistently unsuccessful history as Realpolitik or power politics.[15] Thinking himself clever, Donald Trump champions “America First” (the phrase resonates with those, like the president himself, who have no knowledge of history),but fails to realize that this peculiarly shameful resurrection of “Deutschland uber alles” can lead only to massive defeat and unparalleled despair.
“I loathe, therefore I am,” could well become Donald J. Trump’s “revised” version of René Descartes “Cogito.”[16] Following Descartes, Sigmund Freud had understood that all human beings could somehow be motivated toward creating a “spontaneous sympathy of souls,” but America’s Donald Trump had quite expansively reversed this objective. Reinforced by the rampant vocationalism of this country’s education system, Trump consistently urged citizens to turn against one another, and for no dignified, defensible or science-based reasons. In absolutely all cases, these grotesque urgings had no meritorious or higher purpose.
None at all.
The Individual as Artifact
In the bitterly fractionated post-Trump-era United States, an authentic American individualhas become little more than a charming artifact. Among other things, the nation’s societal “mass,” more refractory than ever to intellect and learning, still displays no discernible intentions of ever taking itself seriously. To the contrary, an embittered American ‘mass” now marches in deferential lockstep, foolishly, without thought, toward even-greater patterns of imitation, unhappiness and starkly belligerent incivility.
All things considered, the American future is not hard to fathom. More than likely, whatever might be decided in upcoming politics and elections, Americans will continue to be carried forth not by any commendable nobilities of principle or purpose, but by steady eruptions of personal and collective agitation, by endlessly inane presidential repetitions and by the perpetually demeaning primacy of a duly “sanctified” public ignorance. At times, perhaps, We the people may still be able to slow down a bit and “smell the roses,” but this is doubtful.
Plainly, our visibly compromised and degraded country now imposes upon its increasingly exhausted people the breathless rhythms of a vast and omnivorous machine.
This machine has no objective other than to keep struggling without spawning any sudden breakdowns or prematurely inconvenient deaths.
Much as many might wish to deny it, the plausible end of this self-destroying machinery will be to prevent Americans from remembering who they are now and (far more importantly) who they might once still have become. At another reasonable level of concern, Americans remain threatened by nuclear war and nuclear terrorism, especially now, following the incoherent Trump-era. Significantly, although there exists a vast literature on law-based strategies of nuclear war avoidance, there is little parallel jurisprudential effort directed toward the prevention of nuclear terrorism.[17]
Arguably this is no longer a “nation of laws.” Rather, it is a nation of ad hoc, narrowly visceral response. Consider in this regard, that in August 2022, Donald Trump complained bitterly that he never had “the loyalty of Hitler’s generals.”
There is more. Americans inhabit the one society that could have been different. Once, we harbored a unique potential to nurture individuals, that is, to encourage Americans to become more than a smugly inert “mass,” “herd” or “crowd.” Then, Ralph Waldo Emerson (also fellow Transcendentalists Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau) described us optimistically as a people animated by industry and “self-reliance.”
Now, however, beyond any serious contestation, we are stymied by collective capitulations to political chicanery and a Kierkegaardian “fear and trembling.”
Surely, as all must eventually acknowledge, there must be more to this chanting country than inane rallies, tsunamis of hyper-adrenalized commerce or gargantuan waves of abundantly cheap entertainments: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” rhapsodized the poet Walt Whitman, but today, the American Selfhas devolved into a delicately thin shadow of any true national potential. Distressingly, this Self has already become a twisting reflection of a prior authenticity. Now it is under seemingly final assault by far-reaching societal tastelessness and by a literally epidemic gluttony.
Regarding this “gastronomic” debility, it’s not that Americans have become more and more hungry, but rather that we have lost any once residual appetites for real life.[18]
Credulity and Conspiracy
In the end, credulity is America’s worst enemy. The stubborn inclination to believe that wider social and personal redemption must lie somewhere in politics remains a potentially fatal disorder. To be fair, various social and economic issues do need to be coherently addressed by America’s political representatives, but so too must the nation’s deeper problems first be solved at the level of microcosm, as a matter for individuals.
In the end, American politics – like politics everywhere – must remain an uninspiring second-order activity, a faint reflection of what is truly important.[19] For now, this public sphere continues to thrive upon vast personal emptiness, on an infirmity that is the always-defiling reciprocal of genuine personal fulfillment. “Conscious of his emptiness,” warns the German philosopher Karl Jaspers in Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952), “man (human) tries to make a faith for himself (or herself) in the political realm. In vain.”
Even in an authentic democracy, only a few can ever hope to redeem themselves and the wider American nation, but these self-effacing souls will generally remain silent, hidden in more-or-less “deep cover,” often even from themselves. In a democracy where education is oriented toward narrowly vocational forms of career preparation, an orientation toward “barbaric specialization,” these residual few can expect to be suffocated by the many. Unsurprisingly, such asphyxiation, in absolutely any of its conceivable particularities, would be a bad way to “die.”[20]
Donald J. Trump did not emerge on the political scene ex nihilo, out of nothing. His incoherent and disjointed presidency is the direct result of a society that has wittingly and barbarously abandoned all serious thought. When such a society no longer asks the “big philosophical questions” – for example, “What is the “good” in government and politics”? or “How do I lead a good life as person and citizen”? or “How can I best nurture the well-being of other human beings”? – the lamentable outcome is inevitable. It is a result that we are still living through in the United States, and one (if Donald Trump becomes president for a second time) that might have to be “died through.”
Looking Behind the News
Going forward, what we ought to fear most of all is precisely this continuously self-defiling outcome, not any particular electoral result. Until recently, nothing could have proved more important for the United States than to rid itself of the intersecting pathologies of Covid19 and a recalcitrant Donald Trump, diseases that were mutually reinforcing and potentially synergistic. But even such indispensable victories could still prove only transient. More precisely, recalling philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset’s timeless warning about the “barbarism of specialisation,” this country must soon resurrect an earlier ethos of education in which learning benefits the whole human being, not just a work-related “corner of the universe.”
Also vital is the obligation to acknowledge the fundamental interrelatedness of all peoples and the binding universality of international law.[21]
To survive as a nation and as individuals, Americans need to become educated not merely as well-trained cogs in the vast industrial machine, but as empathetic and caring citizens. “Everyone is the other, and no one is just himself,” cautions Martin Heidegger in Being and Time (1932), but this elementary lesson once discoverable in myriad sacred texts is not easily operationalized. Indeed, it is in this single monumental failure of “operationalization” that human civilization has most plainly failed. To wit, in Trump-era American democracy, the former president’s core message is never about the co-responsibility of every human being for his or her fellows, but about “winners,” “losers,” and a presumptively rational citizen obligation to “Make America Great.”
In this context, “greatness” assumed a crudely Darwinian or zero-sum condition, not one in which each individual could favor harmonious cooperation over bitter inter-group hatreds.[22]
Making the Souls of the Citizens Better
How shall we finally change all this, or, recalling Plato’s wisdom in The Republic, how shall we “learn to make the souls of the citizens better?”[23] This is not a question that we can answer with any pertinent detail before the next presidential election. But it is still a question that we ought to put before the imperiled American polity sometime before it is too late.[24]
American democracy faces multiple hazards, including Ortega y’Gasset’s “barbarism of specialisation.” To be rescued in time, each hazard will have to be tackled carefully, by itself and in coordinated tandem with all other identifiable perils. Overall, the task will be daunting and overwhelming, but the alternatives are simply no longer tolerable.
Donald Trump’s removal from political life remains a sine qua non for all applicable remedies, but even such a needed first step could target only a catastrophic symptom of America’s national “pathology.” By itself, saving the United States from a crudely sinister president remains necessary, but it would leave unchanged the country’s most deeply underlying “disease.” In the end,[25] because Americans will need to bring a less “specialized” form of learning to their citizenship responsibilities, this nation will have to figure out practical yet commendable ways of restoring educational “wholeness.”
Though we certainly need a well-trained society, we also need one that has been suitably and seriously educated. Before this expectation can be fully understood and acted upon, however, there will need to take place a widened respect for learning and erudition. While Americans will certainly continue to value “practical learning,” they should also begin to value intellectual achievement for its own sake. We need gifted workers in every industry, but we also need reasoning persons and caring citizens.
It could never be practical for Americans to favor human learning based on “attitude” rather than on “preparation.”[26]
Always, “learning in their own flesh” would preclude any genuine citizen education.
[1]A generic explanation of such declensions is supplied by Thomas Mann. The German novelist and philosopher recalls the downfall of ancient civilizations, and faults gradual absorption of the educated classes by the masses, the “simplification” of all functions of political, social, economic and spiritual life. In short, the author of The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice blames “barbarization.” For an informed discussion of these assessments, see Stanley Corngold, The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton; Princeton University Press, 2022.
[2] See especially Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (Sein und Zeit;1953) and Karl Jaspers’ Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952). “Is it an end that draws near,” inquires Jaspers, “or a beginning?” The answer will depend, in large part, on what Heidegger has to say about the Jungian or Freudian “mass.” In Being and Time (1953), the philosopher laments what he calls, in German, das Mann, or “The They.” Drawing fruitfully upon earlier core insights of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jung and Freud, Heidegger’s “The They” represents the ever-present and interchangeable herd, crowd, horde or mass. Each such conglomerate exhibits “untruth” (the term actually favored by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard) because it can encourage the “barbarism of specialisation” and suffocate broadly humanistic kinds of learning.
[3]Smith published Theory seventeen years before his vastly more famous and oft-cited Wealth of Nations (1776).
[4]See, on commonalities between Third Reich and Trump-era American democracy, by Louis René Beres at Jurist: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/05/louis-beres-america-rise-and-fall/
[5] Chapter 12 of The Revolt of the Masses (1930) is aptly titled “The Barbarism of ‘Specialisation.'”
[6]Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche coined an aptly specific term, one he hoped could eventually become universal. This German word was Bildungsphilister. When expressed in its most lucid and coherent English translation, it means “educated Philistine.” Bildungsphilister is a term that could shed useful light upon Donald Trump’s ongoing support from among America’s presumptively well-educated and well-to-do.
[7] On this irony, Kierkegaard says it best in The Sickness unto Death (1849): “Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, he lives in a certain trivial province of experience, as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs. Philistinism thinks it is in control of possibility….it carries possibility around like a prisoner in the cage of the probable, and shows it off.”
[8]Sigmund Freud introduced his own particular version of Nietzsche’s “herd,” which was “horde.” Interestingly, Freud maintained a general antipathy to all things American. He most strenuously objected, according to Bruno Bettelheim, to this country’s “shallow optimism” and also its corollary commitment to the crudest forms of materialism. America, thought Freud, was grievously “lacking in soul.” See: Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), especially Chapter X.
[9] In essence, the “crowd” was Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s equivalent of Nietzsche’s “herd” and Ortega’s “mass.”[9] Earlier, in the 17th century, French philosopher Blaise Pascal remarked prophetically in Pensées: “All our dignity consists in thought….It is upon this that we must depend…Let us labor then to think well: this is the foundation of morality.” Similar reasoning characterizes the writings of Baruch Spinoza, Pascal’s 17th-century contemporary. In Book II of his Ethics Spinoza considers the human mind, or the intellectual attributes, and – drawing further from Descartes – strives to define an essential theory of learning and knowledge.
[10] The most ominous synergies of “barbarism” would concern the growing risks of a nuclear war. On irrational nuclear decision-making by an American president, see Louis René Beres, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: https://thebulletin.org/2016/08/what-if-you-dont-trust-the-judgment-of-the-president-whose-finger-is-over-the-nuclear-button/ See also, by Professor Beres, https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/nuclear-decision-making/ (Pentagon). For authoritative early accounts by Professor Beres of nuclear war expected effects, see: Louis René Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1983); Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis René Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). Most recently, by Professor Beres, see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018). https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israel%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strategy
[11]In this regard, selected elements of the US public ought to be reminded of the explicit warning in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “Do not ever seek the higher man at the market place.” Moreover, it would not be unfair to Nietzsche’s core meaning here to expand “higher man” to mean “higher person.”
[12] Most egregious, in any assessment of these damages, is this president’s wilful subordination of national interest to his own presumed private interests. In this regard, one may suitably recall Sophocles’ cautionary speech of Creon in Antigone: “I hold despicable, and always have…anyone who puts his own popularity before his country.”
[13] Still the best treatments of America’s long-term disinterest in anything intellectual are Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964); and Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1959).
[14] See, by Louis René Beres: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/04/the-trump-presidency-a-breathtaking-assault-on-law-justice-and-security/
[15] The classic statement of Realpolitik or power politics in western philosophy is the comment of Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic: “Justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.” (See Plato, The Republic, 29, Benjamin Jowett, tr., World Publishing Company, 1946.) See also: Cicero’s oft-quoted query: “For what can be done against force without force?” Marcus Tullus Cicero, Cicero’s Letters to his Friends, 78 (D.R. Shackleton Baily tr., Scholars Press, 1988).
[16] “I think, therefore I am,” says René Descartes, in his Discourse on Method (1637). Reciprocally, in his modern classic essay on “Existentialism,” Jean-Paul Sartre observes that “…outside the Cartesian cogito, all views are only probable.”
[17] See, by Professor Louis René Beres: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1410&context=gjicl
[18] An apt literary reference for this condition of “lost appetite” is Franz Kafka’s story, The Hunger Artist.
[19]See by this author, Louis René Beres, at Horasis (Zurich): https://horasis.org/looking-beyond-shadows-death-time-and-immortality/
[20] In more expressly concrete terms, average American life-expectancy, already unenviable for several decades, has now fallen behind most of the advanced industrialized world.
[21] Apropos of this universality, international law is generally part of the law of the United States. These legal systems are always interpenetrating. Declared Mr. Justice Gray, in delivering the judgment of the US Supreme Court in Paquete Habana (1900): “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction….” (175 U.S. 677(1900)) See also: Opinion in Tel-Oren vs. Libyan Arab Republic (726 F. 2d 774 (1984)). The specific incorporation of treaty law into US municipal law is expressly codified at Art. 6 of the US Constitution, the so-called “Supremacy Clause.”
[22] Here it could be helpful to recall the words of French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man: “The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself’ is false and against nature.”
[23] Long after Plato, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thought of “soul” (in German, Seele) as the very essence of a human being. Neither Freud nor Jung ever provides a precise definition of the term, but clearly it was not intended by either in any ordinary religious sense. For both, it was a still-recognizable and critical seat of both mind and passions in this life. Interesting, too, in the present context, is that Freud explained his already-predicted decline of America by various express references to “soul.” Freud was plainly disgusted by any civilization so apparently unmoved by considerations of true “consciousness” (e.g., awareness of intellect and literature), and even thought that the crude American commitment to perpetually shallow optimism and to material accomplishment at any cost would occasion sweeping psychological misery.
[24] “Sometimes,” says Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt, “the worst does happen.”
[25] “In the end,” says Goethe, “we are always creatures of our own making.”
[26] See, about Donald J. Trump: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-kim-jong-un-965367
