“He will choose you, disarm you with his words, and control you with his presence. He will delight you with his wit and his plans. He will smile and deceive you, and he will scare you with his eyes. And when he is through with you, and he will be through with you, he will desert you, and take with him your innocence and your pride."
Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience
"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilised and innocent people. The silence under the terror was only its consequence. The coldness of the societal mindset, the isolated competitor, was the precondition, as indifference to the fate of others, for the fact that only very few people reacted. The torturers know this, and they put it to test ever anew.
Only those who unreflectingly vented their hate and aggression upon them are guilty. One must labor against this lack of reflection, must dissuade people from striking outward without reflecting upon themselves. The only education that has any sense at all is an education toward critical self-reflection."
Theodor Adorno, Education After Auschwitz, 18 April 1966
"Zilu spent the night at Stone Gate. The next morning, the gatekeeper asked him, 'Where have you come from?'
Zilu answered, 'From the house of Confucius.'
'Isn’t he the one who knows that what he does is impossible and yet persists anyway?'”
E. Slingerland, Confucius: Analects, 2003
"Foolishness is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own downfall in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease.
Against such foolishness we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the foolish person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the foolish person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.
For that reason, greater caution is called for dealing with a foolish person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the foolish person with reason, for it is senseless and dangerous. If we want to know how to get the better of foolishness, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet foolish, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but foolish.
The fact that the foolish person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, executed on April 9, 1945
The selloff in risk assets continued today.
Stocks took another leg on what appears to be a rather stiff correction, and went out with only a little bounce to show for the afternoon effort.
Bitcoin was smacked down below 80,000. The chart does not look very promising.
Gold and silver were also smacked down later in the day.
The Dollar chopped a little higher but failed to regain the 104 handle.
The character of the American political scene is eerily reminiscent of 20th century of authoritarianism, as the purveyors of oligarchy become increasingly audacious.
Let's see what happens there.
Don't listen to their words; watch what it is that they do.
Have a pleasant evening.
