Sleepy reason

Sloppy thinking

One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones. Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but be does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them.

Ellul

One sees this clearly in the late fifteenth-century ideas of Machiavelli and the seventeenth-century ideas of the political thinkers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes made fear of dying the centerpiece of his Leviathan, while Locke made preservation of property the justification for government. Hobbes and Locke were the first modern and first liberal political thinkers. In trying to understand them contemporary liberal thinkers focus more on institutions, structures of power, and ways to justify them. But it is more important to see how the psychology of motives replaces the pursuit of goodness. Liberals still fail to see motives as selfish, hence apolitical, and that they point man at his own body, while goodness points him away from it. Motives are disintegrative because they dissolve community and create only temporary alliances for the purpose of momentary satisfaction; they are modernity.

However, the men of the Renaissance tried to rescue the new state units by renouncing Christian spiritual integration. The return to the ancients was a rebuff of the Middle Age scholastics by looking to the Greek and Roman systems of thought for virtues that could be disconnected from the whole that was their inspiration. This is what prompted Nietzsche to conclude scornfully that “the modern doctrine of culture is nothing but a Christianity without Christ.”https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/05/romano-guardini-and-the-dissolution-of-western-culture.html

Why Are So Many Americans Incapable of Thinking Rationally?

https://www.jeremyrhammond.com/2023/08/11/why-are-so-many-americans-incapable-of-thinking-rationally/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Why+Are+So+Many+Americans+So+Stupid%3F&utm_campaign=Why+Are+So+Many+Americans+So+Stupid%3F

The effectiveness of statist propaganda never ceases to amaze me. It is powerful witchcraft casting a spell of delusion over the population.

I would like to think that most people understand that the government lies. I’d like to think that most are capable of thinking for themselves. A recent public opinion survey by Pew Research Center, however, strongly suggests otherwise.

More than half of Americans (55%) said they think that the government should “take steps to restrict false information online, even if it limits freedom of information”.

https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity