Thinking is creativity’s worst enemy…Before the heart can remember, the mind must forget.
—BYRON JANIS: “In Praise of Infidelity” (in music)
Wall Street Journal, Arts & Entertainment, January 6, 2010
[Note: The below comments refer to a previous posting]
November 7, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Wow! Does this mean the same as “Muddying Up the Waters, Twisting the Truth, Blindsighting?
DD
November 7, 2009 at 10:12 pm
I take it to mean that great evils have been perpetrated in the name of some abstraction, such as “dictatorship of the proletariat” (Karl Marx), and, currently, “fairness.”
November 17, 2009 at 2:30 pm
I would go one step further: evil is what happens when you take your abstraction to be more valuable than human beings. The abstraction can be a political ideology, regardless of flavour, a religion, or even that often abused concept “the market”. (I’m all for market economy, of course. But “the market” is simply the sum of all economic decisions taken by individual humans. To claim that the abstract market is right and concrete human beings are wrong, as some do, is self-contradictory.)
November 17, 2009 at 3:05 pm
I fully agree with your first sentence. I guess I have be in accord with all that follows, therefore. Thanks for the thoughtful comment.