Ideas so stupid only intellectuals can believe

A book review, and a life review, neither of which is likely to appeal to our blinkered, blinded and stupefied Left, serves us well here. But only some of us. Most people are happy to live in cave-like error, doing what others do, being normally social and conservative, even if that is a radicalist behaviour in outcome.The willing suspension of disbelief is essential to social living, for otherwise we would have no society, no art, no language, no relationships of any kind but narcissistic hedonism for a moment. Seers are a menace. Plato is right in exiling them from his Republic, if there is to be a Republic. Or, perhaps, we might rather find a golden mean between revolution and hippie conformity.

Thomas F. Bertonneau "Sigrid Undset Crosses Russia: The Remarkable Case of Back from the Future," (1942) Brussels Journal. 03 March 2009

Seeing things plain, not lying to oneself, not subscribing to the, delusions of others – these virtues, seemingly so simple, prove in life difficult to achieve and tricky to exercise. An inevitable imitative pressure assimilates people to one another so that mere opinion, received but never vetted, comes to function as a surrogate reality, in the cave-like error of which people stumble about their errands in a lurching mockery of witting behavior. The ancients worried about false or second-hand judgment (doxa) or about superstition. Modern people must grapple with ideology. The critique of ideology is the single most important exercise that an individual can undertake who wants to stand in truth and by his own lights against the conformist pressure of public opinion, or what dissenters nowadays call political correctness.

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