Ambiguous Political Quotes

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. [...] It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement. Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. [...] The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology.

The marriage of reason and nightmare that dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia…In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way.

According to the evidence provided by the Wasp Trap files, the Fleet Street newspaper proprietor was introduced to, among other prominent Nazis, Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, in 1934. Speer was also Hitler’s closest military adviser just before the war. Evidence from a letter allegedly from Speer to the Fleet Street newspaper proprietor, thanking him for information about the Paris defences and the Free French army. A photograph of a letter allegedly from the Fleet Street proprietor, also included in these discovered files, advises Force Yellow – the German invading army – to avoid the Maginot line entirely and invade through neutral Belgium and the other Low Countries. There is no evidence that totally confirms these letters are genuine, or, indeed, from Speer or the Fleet Street newspaper proprietor. “In June 1940, when the Nazis occupied Paris, the Fleet Street newspaper proprietor was back in London and became liaison executive between the secret services in Britain and agents in France. It is possibly no coincidence that the invading Nazi forces occupied a house in Avenue Foch, Paris, owned by the newspaper proprietor’s family. The house was then used for the entertainment of senior Nazi officers. The Wasp Trap files document that the Fleet Street newspaper proprietor had allegedly been credited with over thirty British agents and Free French operatives being captured, tortured and killed.

Are Latino-Americans white? Black? Other? Illegal aliens from Mars? Or are we the very face of America?

Yeah, we should all line up along the Bosphorus Bridge and puff as hard as we can to shove this city in the direction of the West. If that doesn't work, we'll try the other way, see if we can veer to the East. It's no good to be in between. International politics does not appreciate ambiguity.

The death of the spirit is the price of progress. Nietzsche revealed this mystery of the Western apocalypse when he announced that God was dead and that He had been murdered. This Gnostic murder is constantly committed by the men who sacrificed God to civilization. The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world–immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline. A civilization can, indeed, advance and decline at the same time—but not forever. There is a limit toward which this ambiguous process moves; the limit is reached when an activist sect which represents the Gnostic truth organizes the civilization into an empire under its rule. Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of Gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization.

I'm beginning to wonder," said Kent, sitting down now on an overturned wooden tub. "Who do I serve? Why am I here?" You are here, because, in the expanding ethical ambiguity of our situation, you are steadfast in your righteousness. It is to you, our banished friend, that we all turn—a light amid the dark dealings of family and politics. You are the moral backbone on which the rest of us hang our bloody bits. Without you we are merely wiggly masses of desire writhing in our own devious bile." Really?" asked the old knight. Aye," said I. I'm not sure I want to keep company with you lot, then.

...that ambiguous area of culture where something unfailingly political, though separate from the political choices of the day, infiltrates judgment and language.

I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that 'issue' I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity.

To say that one need art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognizing and condemning things as evil. However, it might stop one being so utterly convinced of the certainty of one's own solutions. There needs to be a strong understanding of fallibility and how the very act of certainty or authoritativeness can bring disasters.

It was the new politics of ambiguity—speaking for the lower and middle classes to get their support in times of rapid growth and potential turmoil. The two-party system came into its own in this time. To give people a choice between two different parties and allow them, in a period of rebellion, to choose the slightly more democratic one was an ingenious mode of control.

Political activists rarely like fiction of any kind. Literature is about ambiguity, mixed emotions, and guilty pleasures. Politics is about ideals and action.

Whether it’s ourselves, our lovers, bosses, children, local Scrooge, or the political situation, it’s more daring and real not to shut anyone out of our hearts and not to make the other into an enemy. If we begin to live like this, we’ll find that we actually can’t make things completely right or completely wrong anymore, because things are a lot more slippery and playful than that. Everything is ambiguous; everything is always shifting and changing, and there are as many different takes on any given situation as there are people involved. Trying to find absolute rights and wrongs is a trick we play on ourselves to feel secure and comfortable.

We have gone sick by following a path of untrammelled rationalism, male dominance, attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom-line-ism. We have gone very, very sick. And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick, it begins to produce antibodies, or strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease. And the 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing. Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing, the list is endless. What do all these things have in common? They represent various styles of rejection of linear values. The society is trying to cure itself by an archaic revival, by a reversion to archaic values. So when I see people manifesting sexual ambiguity, or scarifying themselves, or showing a lot of flesh, or dancing to syncopated music, or getting loaded, or violating ordinary canons of sexual behaviour, I applaud all of this; because it's an impulse to return to what is felt by the body -- what is authentic, what is archaic -- and when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very centre of all these impulses is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment of feeling. And at the centre of that impulse is the shaman: stoned, intoxicated on plants, speaking with the spirit helpers, dancing in the moonlight, and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious, living mystery. That's what the world is. The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery: our birth, our death, our being in the moment -- these are mysteries. They are doorways opening on to unimaginable vistas of self-exploration, empowerment and hope for the human enterprise. And our culture has killed that, taken it away from us, made us consumers of shoddy products and shoddier ideals. We have to get away from that; and the way to get away from it is by a return to the authentic experience of the body -- and that means sexually empowering ourselves, and it means getting loaded, exploring the mind as a tool for personal and social transformation. The hour is late; the clock is ticking; we will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball. We are the inheritors of millions and millions of years of successfully lived lives and successful adaptations to changing conditions in the natural world. Now the challenge passes to us, the living, that the yet-to-be-born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under; and that's what the psychedelic experience is about, is caring for, empowering, and building a future that honours the past, honours the planet and honours the power of the human imagination. There is nothing as powerful, as capable of transforming itself and the planet, as the human imagination. Let's not sell it straight. Let's not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies. Let's not give our control over to the least among us. Rather, you know, claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination. Thank you very, very much.

The rage for 'identity' too often bespeaks a preference for simplicity rather than for complexity.

People who often falsely accuse, who repeatedly disbelieve the truthful, establish a relationship that makes fear signs ambiguous, likely whether their suspect is truthful or lying.

If untruths become part of our language—untruths that in context are intended to be interpreted as polite expressions or figure of speech—then each person is left to decide for themselves the meaning of any sentence. And when language and meaning become subjective, society breaks down. The rule of law becomes a grey area. Commands become suggestions. And how do you keep anyone, including yourself, accountable for actions based on ambiguous language?

What Americans value and strive for is straight talking, plain saying. They don’t go in for ambiguity or dissembling, the etiquette of hidden meaning, the skill of the socially polite lie.

من الممكن فهم كيف يوظف نظام سلطوي لا يتمتع بالكاريزما الرموز والبلاغة لإنتاج السلطة السياسية بما يساهم في استمراريته. وحقيقة أن الأسد بقي في الحكم منذ عام 1970 دليل على فاعلية هذه الاستراتيجية .

A network can be destroyed by noises that attack and transform it, if the codes in place are unable to normalize and repress them. Although the new order is not contained in the structure of the old, it is nonetheless not a product of chance. It is created by the substitution of new differences for the old differences. Noise is the source of these mutations in the structuring codes. For despite the death it contains, noise carries order within itself; it carries new information. This may seem strange. But noise does in fact create a meaning: first, because the interruption of a message signifies the interdiction of the transmitted meaning, signifies censorship and rarity; and second, because the very absence of meaning in pure noise or in the meaningless repetition of a message, by unchanneling auditory sensations, frees the listener’s imagination. The absence of meaning is in this case the presence of all meanings, absolute ambiguity, a construction outside meaning. The presence of noise makes sense, makes meaning. It makes possible the creation of a new order on another level of organization, of a new code in another network.

I suppose I am talking about just that: the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs, the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man's own blood. If man was bound to err, then any social organization was bound to be in error. It was a premise which still seems to me accurate enough, but one which robbed us early of a certain capacity for surprise.

...Spinoza’s Conjecture:“Belief comes quickly and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural, and most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity. The scientific principle that a claim is untrue unless proven otherwise runs counter to our natural tendency to accept as true that which we can comprehend quickly. Thus it is that we should reward skepticism and disbelief, and champion those willing to change their mind in the teeth of new evidence. Instead, most social institutions-most notably those in religion, politics, and economics-reward belief in the doctrines of the faith or party or ideology, punish those who challenge the authority of the leaders, and discourage uncertainty and especially skepticism.

The fundamentalist mind...is essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate no ambiguities.

Seasoning one’s claims with self-irony and modesty, cultivating a tolerance for moral ambiguity, periodically practicing normative reticence, building up a resistance to the pleasure of purity, minding your own business, doing what you can to forget to wreak vengeance, defending negative freedom even if there is no such thing, and playing around are the best you can do. But that’s quite a lot.

إن فاعلية النظام السلطوي في سورية لا تكمن فقط في التكنولوجيا المتوفرة لمراقبة وعقاب المواطنين ومُجازاة آخرين, لكن أيضا في الطرق التي يتم من خلالها تحويل القوة القمعية إلى القوة الانضباطية, غالباً من خلال ممارسات بلاغية ومزيفة بوضوح, تتطلب تعاون مواطني النظام ومشاركتهم.

The many meanings of 'evolution' are frequently exploited by Darwinists to distract their critics. Eugenie Scott recommends: 'Define evolution as an issue of the history of the planet: as the way we try to understand change through time. The present is different from the past. Evolution happened, there is no debate within science as to whether it happened, and so on... I have used this approach at the college level.' Of course, no college student—indeed, no grade-school dropout— doubts that 'the present is different from the past.' Once Scott gets them nodding in agreement, she gradually introduces them to 'The Big Idea' that all species—including monkeys and humans—are related through descent from a common ancestor... This tactic is called 'equivocation'—changing the meaning of a term in the middle of an argument.

I love the unanswered question, the unresolved story, the unclimbed mountain, the tender shard of an incomplete dream. Most of the time. But is it mandatory for a writer to be ambiguous about everything? Isn't it true that there have been fearful episodes in human history when prudence and discretion would have just been euphemisms for pusillanimity? When caution was actually cowardice? When sophistication was disguised decadence? When circumspection was really a kind of espousal? Isn't it true, or at least theoretically possible, that there are times in the life of a people or a nation when the political climate demands that we—even the most sophisticated of us—overtly take sides? I think such times are upon us.

I don't care about any theory or any philosophy or any of that shit! Blackness is visible! The idea that someone can be black, but not look black is ridiculous! White passing and all that other nonsense about being racially ambiguous but still Black is a god damned lie! The one drop rule is a lie!

لقد توصل الباحثين إلى أن الاستعانة بالرموز التي لها قيمة ثقافية وتاريخية لمجتمع ما, يمكن أن تساعد في زيادة "شرعية" نظام محدد. وإذا كانوا يعنون "بالشرعية" شعبية النظام أو كونه الأكثر ملائمة, فهم يقولون بأن النظام يحاول أن يرتبط بعقول الشعب من خلال رموز ثقافية لها أصداؤها, كما انها تحمل معاني شعورية بطريقة مفضلة للمواطنين.

An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or a soap-works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn't work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscience.

The second main characteristic of our political courts is the lack of ambiguity in their work, which is to say predetermined verdicts.

الأسد ليس الصيدلي الأول بأي معنى حرفي ذي دلالة. لكن الأسد قوي لأن نظامه قادرعلى إكراه الناس على أن يكرروا ما يثير السخرية ويجاهروا بما لا يقبله العقل.

Byron published the first two cantos of his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a romanticized account of his wanderings through Portugal, Malta, and Greece, and, as he later remarked, “awoke one morning and found myself famous.” Beautiful, seductive, troubled, brooding, and sexually adventurous, he was living the life of a Byronic hero while creating the archetype in his poetry. He became the toast of literary London and was feted at three parties each day, most memorably a lavish morning dance hosted by Lady Caroline Lamb. Lady Caroline, though married to a politically powerful aristocrat who was later prime minister, fell madly in love with Byron. He thought she was “too thin,” yet she had an unconventional sexual ambiguity (she liked to dress as a page boy) that he found enticing. They had a turbulent affair, and after it ended she stalked him obsessively. She famously declared him to be “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” which he was. So was she.

In many deceits the victim overlooks the liar’s mistakes, giving ambiguous behavior the best reading, collusively helping to maintain the lie, to avoid the terrible consequences of uncovering the lie.

Ambivalence and ambiguity aren't necessarily signs of weakness or sins of indecision. They can be apt responses to events we don't yet understand, with outcomes we can't predict. But they don't make for bold sentences or tidy talking points.

The Supreme Court, the final arbiter of legal conflicts, reviews, acts of the executive and Congress. With this power, the Court is seen as a political institution as well. "Because the key provisions of the Constitution are couched in grand ambiguities and because the key provisions concern the larger issues of our life, of our liberties, and of our happiness, the Supreme Court, by the exercise of judicial review, wields tremendous political power," Joaquin Bernas, a Jesuit priest and constitutionalist, said.

The South African artist William Kentridge speaks to this type of certainty: 'To say that one needs art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognizing and condemning things as evil. However, it might stop one being so utterly convinced of the certainty of one's own solutions. There needs to be a strong understanding of fallibility and how the very act of certainty or authoritativeness can bring disasters.' The outcome of the current crisis is already determined.

We live in a world shaped by the ambiguous legacy of the Enlightenment...[it] enlarged the scope of human freedom, prepared our minds for the scientific method, made man the measure of all things, and placed individual consent front and center on the political stage.

The will to insist upon a definite, unimpeachable reading of an incident - which might well have been read in other, more generous ways - was a mark of a bewildering denial: a denial of the imagination that, liberated to do its proper work, can lead us in alternative directions.

Trumpism is a somewhat ambiguous concept. Trump is not a philosopher. He doesn’t have a political theory or any underlying beliefs. The only -isms that he has ever been associated with are racism and narcissism. The best summary of Trumpism is “billionaire-funded racial grievance politics.

Like the Church the individual Christian will not be able to escape the deep ambiguities of this-wordly existence whether in its cultural, social, political or other aspects, and he too will inevitably be a mixture of good and evil, with a compromised life, so that he can only live eschatologically in the judgment and mercy of God, putting off the old man and putting on Christ anew each day, always aware that even when he has done all that it is his duty to do he remains an unprofitable servant, but summoned to look away from himself to Christ, remembering that he is dead through the cross of Christ but alive and risen in Him. His true being is hid with Christ in God. The whole focus of his vision and the whole perspective of his life in Christ’s name will be directed to the unveiling of that reality of his new being at the parousia, but meantime he lives day by day out of the Word and Sacraments. As one baptized into Christ he is told by God’s Word that his sins are already forgiven and forgotten by God, that he has been justified once for all, and that he does not belong to himself but to Christ who loved him and gave Himself for him. As one summoned to the Holy Table he is commanded by the Word of God to live only in such a way that he feeds upon Christ, not in such a way that he feeds upon his own activities or lives out of his own capital of alleged spirituality. He lives from week to week, by drawing his life and strength from the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, nourished by the body and blood of Christ, and in the strength of that communion he must live and work until Christ comes again. As often as he partakes of the Eucharist he partakes of the self-consecration of Jesus Christ who sanctified Himself for our sakes that we might be sanctified in reality and be presented to the Father as those whom He has redeemed and perfected (or consecrated) together with Himself in one. Here He is called to lift up his heart to the ascended Lord, and to look forward to the day when the full reality of his new being in Christ will be unveiled, making Scripture and Sacrament no longer necessary.

And as I write this, Romans 13:1 recently made the rounds on the American political scene to shield the administration from criticism for separating illegal immigrants from their children at the border—which is just one of many reasons why politicians should not be allowed near a Bible without adult supervision.

Baloney, bamboozles, careless thinking, flimflam, and wishes disguised as facts are not restricted to parlor magic and ambiguous advice on matters of the heart. Unfortunately, they ripple through mainstream political, social, religious, and economic issues in every nation. -Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World. P. 244

The relevant framework is not one of morality but of survival. At every level, from brute camouflage to poetic vision, the linguistic capacity to conceal, misinform, leave ambiguous, hypothesize, invent is indispensable to the equilibrium of human consciousness and to the development of man in society....—George Steiner, After Babel

If the secret core of potlatch is the reciprocity of exchange, why is this reciprocity not asserted directly, why does it assume the “mystified” form of two consecutive acts each of which is staged as a free voluntary display of generosity? Here we encounter the paradoxes of forced choice, of freedom to do what is necessary, at its most elementary: I have to do freely what I am expected to do. (If, upon receiving a gift, I immediately return it to the giver, this direct circulation would amount to an extremely aggressive gesture of humiliation, it would signal that I refused the other’s gifts — recall those embarrassing moments when elderly people forget and give us last year’s present once again … ) …the reciprocity of exchange is in itself thoroughly ambiguous; at its most fundamental, it is destructive of the social bond, it is the logic of revenge, tit for tat. To cover this aspect of exchange, to make it benevolent and pacific, one has to pretend that each person’s gift is free and stands on its own. This brings us to potlatch as the “pre-economy of the economy,” its zero-level, that is, exchange as the reciprocal relation of two non-productive expenditures. If the gift belongs to Master and exchange to the Servant, potlatch is the paradoxical exchange between Masters. Potlach is simultaneously the zero-level of civility, the paradoxical point at which restrained civility and obscene consumption overlap, the point at which it is polite to behave impolitely.

Rasa has two primary meanings: 'feeling' and 'meaning'. As 'feeling' it is one of the traditional Javanese five senses - seeing, hearing, talking, smelling and feeling, and it includes within itself three aspects of "feeling" that our view of the 5 senses separates: taste of tongue, touch on the body, and emotional 'feeling' within the 'heart' like sadness and happiness. The taste of a banana is its rasa; a hunch is a rasa; a pain is a rasa; and so is the passion. As 'meaning', rasa is applied to words in a letter, in a poem, or even in common speech to indicate the between-the-lines type of indirection and allusive suggestion that is so important in Javanese communication and social intercourse. And it is given the same application to behavioral acts generally: to indicate the implicit import, the connotative 'feeling' of dance movements, polite gestures, and so forth. But int his second, semantic sense, it also means 'ultimate significance' - the deepest meaning at which one arrives by dint of mystical effort and whose clarification resolves all the ambiguities of mundane existence(...) (The interpretation of cultures)

عندما تفرض رقابة على حقائق (في الإعلام الرسمي), مثل إنفجار قنبلة في مبنى حكومي, فلا يكون هناك سبيل للناس لمناقشة أحداث تؤثر على حياتهم بشكل علني, مع هذا فتحريم الحديث العام لا يمنع الناس من الحديث عنه بشكل خاص أمام من يثقون بهم. فمجالات الممنوعات والمحرمات والسرية تتوسع مع إنكماش المجال السياسي الرسمي. إذ تصبح الاحداث العامة معلومات مثيرة أو شائعات محفوظة ومرعية ومكشوفة بين الأصدقاء.

But what is sovereignty? It is, they say, the power to make laws. Another absurdity, a relic of despotism. The nation had long seen kings issuing their commands in this form: for such is our pleasure; it wished to taste in its turn the pleasure of making laws. For fifty years it has brought them forth by myriads; always, be it understood, through the agency of representatives. The play is far from ended. The definition of sovereignty was derived from the definition of the law. The law, they said, is the expression of the will of the sovereign: then, under a monarchy, the law is the expression of the will of the king; in a republic, the law is the expression of the will of the people. Aside from the difference in the number of wills, the two systems are exactly identical: both share the same error, namely, that the law is the expression of a will; it ought to be the expression of a fact. Moreover they followed good leaders: they took the citizen of Geneva for their prophet, and the contrat social for their Koran. Bias and prejudice are apparent in all the phrases of the new legislators. The nation had suffered from a multitude of exclusions and privileges; its representatives issued the following declaration: All men are equal by nature and before the law; an ambiguous and redundant declaration. Men are equal by nature: does that mean that they are equal in size, beauty, talents, and virtue? No; they meant, then, political and civil equality. Then it would have been sufficient to have said: All men are equal before the law.

يقترح سيمور مارتن ليبست بديلا لفهم الشرعية فيقول: "قابلية النظام السياسي على إحداث الاعتقاد بأن المؤسسات السياسية القائمة هي الأفضل للمجتمع والإبقاء عليه" هذا الاستخدام الإجتماعي العلمي للمصطلح سيثير أسئلة شائكة فيما لو طبق على الحالة السورية. فهل تؤدي الاستعراضات إلى "إيجاد الإعتقاد والإبقاء عليه" بأن حكم الأسد هو الأفضل للمجتمع السوري ؟ هل تساهم الاستعراضات في الحالة السورية في جعل حكم الأسد أكثر شعبية ؟

What did we talk about? I don't remember. We talked so hard and sat so still that I got cramps in my knee. We had too many cups of tea and then didn't want to leave the table to go to the bathroom because we didn't want to stop talking. You will think we talked of revolution but we didn't. Nor did we talk of our own souls. Nor of sewing. Nor of babies. Nor of departmental intrigue. It was political if by politics you mean the laboratory talk that characters in bad movies are perpetually trying to convey (unsuccessfully) when they Wrinkle Their Wee Brows and say (valiantly--dutifully--after all, they didn't write it) "But, Doctor, doesn't that violate Finagle's Constant?" I staggered to the bathroom, released floods of tea, and returned to the kitchen to talk. It was professional talk. It left my grey-faced and with such concentration that I began to develop a headache. We talked about Mary Ann Evans' loss of faith, about Emily Brontë's isolation, about Charlotte Brontë's blinding cloud, about the split in Virginia Woolf's head and the split in her economic condition. We talked about Lady Murasaki, who wrote in a form that no respectable man would touch, Hroswit, a little name whose plays "may perhaps amuse myself," Miss Austen, who had no more expression in society than a firescreen or a poker. They did not all write letters, write memoirs, or go on the stage. Sappho--only an ambiguous, somewhat disagreeable name. Corinna? The teacher of Pindar. Olive Schriener, growing up on the veldt, wrote on book, married happily, and ever wrote another. Kate Chopin wrote a scandalous book and never wrote another. (Jean has written nothing.). There was M-ry Sh-ll-y who wrote you know what and Ch-rl-tt- P-rk-ns G-lm-an, who wrote one superb horror study and lots of sludge (was it sludge?) and Ph-ll-s Wh--tl-y who was black and wrote eighteenth century odes (but it was the eighteenth century) and Mrs. -nn R-dcl-ff- S-thw-rth and Mrs. G--rg- Sh-ld-n and (Miss?) G--rg-tt- H-y-r and B-rb-r- C-rtl-nd and the legion of those, who writing, write not, like the dead Miss B--l-y of the poem who was seduced into bad practices (fudging her endings) and hanged herself in her garter. The sun was going down. I was blind and stiff. It's at this point that the computer (which has run amok and eaten Los Angeles) is defeated by some scientifically transcendent version of pulling the plug; the furniture stood around unknowing (though we had just pulled out the plug) and Lady, who got restless when people talked at suck length because she couldn't understand it, stuck her head out from under the couch, looking for things to herd. We had talked for six hours, from one in the afternoon until seven; I had at that moment an impression of our act of creation so strong, so sharp, so extraordinarily vivid, that I could not believe all our talking hadn't led to something more tangible--mightn't you expect at least a little blue pyramid sitting in the middle of the floor?

We are to hold accountable those on the inside, and speak to those on the outside with persuasion and mission. We tend to do the exact reverse. We rail against the culture outside, and speak in muted and ambiguous terms about what is common among us. We lambaste political and cultural heresies on the outside, but sit silently in the face of doctrinal heresies in the inside. That's because we are seeing the wrong kingdom first.

Politics always puts forward Ideas: Nation, Empire, Union, Economy, etc. But none of these forms has value in itself; it has it only insofar as it involves concrete individuals. If a nation can assert itself proudly only to the detriment of its members, if a union can be created only to the detriment of those it is trying to unite, the nation or the union must be rejected. We repudiate all idealisms, mysticisms, etcetera which prefer a Form to man himself.

What happens, Kissinger asked, “if technology has become such a part of everyday life that it defines its own universe as the sole relevant one?” In this system there was little room for human will or agency or the cultivation of such human qualities as ambiguity and intuition. Hard facts bred a tyranny of their own that prioritized the immediate present over an understanding of the past or a sensitivity toward the future. Focus groups and opinion polls replaced individual decision-making and responsibility; the immediate headline-driven mood of the crowd overrode long-range perspective. Foreign policy was “in danger of turning into a subdivision of short-term domestic politics” in which “the quest is for consensus, less by the exchange of ideas than by a sharing of emotions.” The United States was in danger of “careening through crises without comprehending them.” This was no way for a great power to engage with the rest of the world, least of all in a world armed with nuclear weapons.

A secure attachment is marked by “self-confidence, empathy, and trust,” note researchers Christopher Weber and Christopher Federico, and can lead to a general belief that the world is a “safe, harmonious place” populated by people of goodwill. The secure voter, therefore, will tend to be tolerant of ambiguity and disinclined to embrace a rigid dogmatism. According to attachment expert Mario Mikulincer, a secure attachment produces “more moderate, more flexible, and more realistic political views.

In any case, Klossowski, mentioned again during Acéphale's sessional meeting of 25 July 1938, would later return to his opposition between Nietzsche and Bataille in a lecture given in 1941 at the end of a retreat in a Dominican monastery, 'Le Corps du néant', later printed in the first edition of his book Sade my Neighbour (1947) and which Bataille later told him he 'does not like'. Here Klossowski recapitulated the two stages in the evolution of Nietzsche's thought outlined in Löwith's essay 'Nietzsche and the doctrine of the Eternal Return', which he had reviewed in Acéphale 2: 1. Liberation from the Christian YOU MUST to achieve the I WANT of supra-nihilism; 2. Liberation from the I WANT to attain the I AM of superhumanity in the eternal return. It is precisely in this 'cyclical movement', according to Klossowski, that man 'takes on the immeasurable responsibility of the death of God'. Furthermore, he associates Bataille's negation of God with the negation of utility upon which the notion of expenditure was founded, and hence the source of his 'absolute political nihilism'. His conclusion, however, was a little more ambiguous: 'In his desire to relive the Nietzschean experience of the death of God [...] he did not have the privilege [...] of suffering Nietzsche's punishment: the delirium that transfigures the executioner into a victim [...] To be guilty or not to be, that is his dilemma. His acephality expresses only the unease of a guilt in which conscience has become alienated because he has put faith to sleep: and this is to experience God in the manner of demons, as St. Augustine said'. Unlike Nietzsche. who 'accused himself' of causing the death of God 'in the name of all men' and paid for his guilt with madness, unlike Kirillov, the nihilist in Dostoyevsky's Demons who chose to commit suicide so as to kill men's fear of death and thus kill God himself, Bataille shows us this frightful torment of not being able to make his guilt real and so attain that state of responsibility that gives knowledge of the path to absolution.

قدم استفتاء عام 1991 فرصة لعروض غير مسبوقة من التزلف ويذكر ناقد أدبي سوري كيف ساد جو من "الهيستيريا العامة" حول العاصمة السورية. وأعلنت منى واصف لجمهورها التلفزيوني كيف أن الدنيا أمطرت لأن السوريين كانوا يجرون استفتاء يؤكدون من خلاله ولاءهم وإخلاصهم لحافظ الأسد. وكان الاستفتاء مناسبة للدعاية لاحتمالات الطموح التوريثي العائلي للنظام عندما ظهرت بعض الملصقات التي تحتفل بالأسد "كأبي باسل", في إشارة إلى ابنه الأكبر. وعندما قتل باسل بحادث سيارة سنة 94 , ظهرت ملصقات بشعارات تقدس ذكراه إلى جانب صور للأسد, ويبدأ المنظرون مباشرة بترفيع ابنه الثاني, بشار, كخليفة لوالده.

We do not converse. She visits me to talk. My task to murmur. She talks about her grandsons, her daughter who lives in Delphi, her sister or her husband - both gone - obscure friends - dead - obscurer aunts and uncles - lost - ancient neighbors, members of her church or of her clubs - passed or passing on; and in this way she brings the ends of her life together with a terrifying rush: she is a girl, a wife, a mother, widow, all at once. All at once - appalling - but I believe it; I wince in expectation of the clap. Her talk's a fence - shade drawn, window fastened, door that's locked - for no one dies taking tea in a kitchen; and as her years compress and begin to jumble, I really believe in the brevity of life; I sweat in my wonder; death is the dog down the street, the angry gander, bedroom spider, goblin who's come to get her; and it occurs to me that in my listening posture I'm the boy who suffered the winds of my grandfather with an exactly similar politeness, that I am, right now, all my ages, out in elbows, as angular as badly stacekd cards. Thus was I, when I loved you, every man I could be, youth and child - far from enough - and you, so strangely ambiguous a being, met me, h eart for spade, play after play, the whole run of our suits.

Three conclusions emerge from Richelieu’s career. First, the indispensable element of a successful foreign policy is a long-term strategic concept based on a careful analysis of all relevant factors. Second, the statesman must distill that vision by analyzing and shaping an array of ambiguous, often conflicting pressures into a coherent and purposeful direction. He (or she) must know where this strategy is leading and why. And, third, he must act at the outer edge of the possible, bridging the gap between his society’s experiences and its aspirations. Because repetition of the familiar leads to stagnation, no little daring is required.

طُلب من أحد الرسامين أن يرسم لوحة لتعليقها في مكتب الأسد. اللوحة التي تم اختيارها تصور معركة حطين التي هزم فيها صلاح الدين الصليبيين واستعاد القدس للسيطرة العربية. أضاف الرسام فوق منظر المعركة صورة كبيرة لوجه حافظ الأسد, مضيفا عبارة :"من حطين إلى تشرين".تشرين مفهوم على نطاق واسع ليعني حرب تشرين 1973, وهكذا تشير اللوحة,التي وزعت على نطاق واسع أثناء الاستفتاء الشعبي لإعادة انتخاب الرئيس 1991, إلى أنها تقرن حرب أكتوبر التي قادها الأسد مع النصر العسكري الكبير الذي أحرزه صلاح الدين.يدعى الرسام أن وجهة نظره تتمثل في ان يلفت نظر المواطنين إلى الاختلاف بين انتصار صلاح الدين و"انتصار" الأسد.وهكذا وجد الرسام طريقة لتحوير (أو على الأقل إقناع نفسه بأنه يحور) رموز الدولة من دون أن يقع في متاعب مع السلطة.

The fundamental ambiguity of the human condition will always open up to men the possibility of opposing choices; there will always be within them the desire to be that being of whom they have made themselves a lack, the flight from the anguish of freedom; the plane of hell, of struggle, will never be eliminated; freedom will never be given; it will always have to be won: that is what Trotsky was saying when he envisaged the future as a permanent revolution. Thus, there is a fallacy hidden in that abuse of language which all parties make use of today to justify their politics when they declare that the world is still at war. If one means by that that the struggle is not over, that the world is a prey to opposed interests which affront each other violently, he is speaking the truth; but he also means that such a situation is abnormal and calls for abnormal behavior; the politics that it involves can impugn every moral principle, since it has only a provisional form: later on we shall act in accordance with truth and justice. To the idea of present war there is opposed that of a future peace when man will again find, along with a stable situation, the possibility of a morality. But the truth is that if division and violence define war, the world has always been at war and always will be; if man is waiting for universal peace in order to establish his existence validly, he will wait indefinitely: there will never be any other future.

In a profile of Robert Kennedy, Morgenthau explained how emotion, even in the best of causes, could obscure reason and rationality, and what he said about Kennedy applied to the student demonstrators as well: “Robert Kennedy was not reflective but emotional,” Morgenthau remarked. When he saw evil and suffering in the world, he felt he had to do something. “But since he was unaware of the ambiguity of moral judgments, he was also unaware of the moral and pragmatic ambiguity of the political act performed in emotional response to a moral judgment. His approach was morally fundamentalist and politically simplistic.” Much like the student protesters, many of whom became Kennedy followers after he came to share their passion about the war. Moral fundamentalism and perfectionism were their credo. Emotion, not reflection, determined a policy of resistance that was no-policy. Except for a shared opposition to the Vietnam war, the stern, Nietzschean, hyperintellectual Morgenthau and the idealistic, impassioned students had almost nothing in common. Their intellectual premises barely overlapped; their mind-sets functioned in different universes. As Morgenthau had written in Politics Among Nations, “A man who was nothing but ‘moral man’ would be a fool.” The students were “moral men” and proud of the fact. And then in 1968, as if to pound his point home, Morgenthau took a step that would have been incomprehensible to most of them. He came out in support of Richard Nixon for president.

Treason the only crime defined in the Constitution. Tyranny as under the Stuart and Tudor kings characterized by the elimination of political dissent under the laws of treason. Treason statutes which were many and unending, the instrument by which the monarch eliminated his opposition and also added to his wealth. The property of the executed traitor forfeited by his heirs because of the loathsomeness of his crime. The prosecution of treason, like witchcraft, an industry. Founding Fathers extremely sensitive to the establishment of a tyranny in this country by means of ambiguous treason law. Themselves traitors under British law. Under their formulation it became possible to be guilty of treason only against the nation, not the individual ruler or party. Treason was defined as an action rather than thought or speech. "Treason against the US shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid & Comfort...No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same Overt act, or on Confession in Open Court." This definition, by members of the constitutional convention, intended that T could not be otherwise defined short of constitutional amendment. "The decision to impose constitutional safeguards on treason prosecutions formed part of a broad emerging American tradition of liberalism...No American has ever been executed for treason against his country," says Nathaniel Weyl, Treason the story of disloyalty and betrayal in American history, published in the year 1950. I say if this be treason make the most of it.

Language... is a highly ambiguous business. So often, below the word spoken, is the thing known and unspoken... You and I, the characters which grow on a page, most of the time we're inexpressive, giving little away, unreliable, elusive, obstructive, unwilling. But it's out of these attributes that a language arises. A language, I repeat, where under what is said, another thing is being said... There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smokescreen. When true silence falls, we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness. We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase, "failure of communication", and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility. I am not suggesting that no character in a play can ever say what he in fact means. Not at all. I have found that there invariably does come a moment when this happens, when he says something, perhaps, which he has never said before. And where this happens, what he says is irrevocable, and can never be taken back.

Starting with Theodor Adorno in the 1950s, people have suggested that lower intelligence predicts adherence to conservative ideology. Some but not all studies since then have supported this conclusion. More consistent has been a link between lower intelligence and a subtype of conservatism, namely right-wing authoritarianism (RWA, a fondness for hierarchy). ... The standard, convincing explanation for the link is that RWA provides simple answers, ideal for people with poor abstract reasoning skills. The literature has two broad themes. One is that rightists are relatively uncomfortable with ambiguity; ... . The other is that leftists, well, think harder, have a greater capacity for what the political scientist Philip Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania calls "integrative complexity". In one study, conservatives and liberals, when asked about the causes of poverty, both tended toward personal attributions (“They’re poor because they’re lazy”). But only if they had to make snap judgments. Give people more time, and liberals shifted toward situational explanations (“Wait, things are stacked against the poor”). In other words, conservatives start gut and stay gut; liberals go from gut to head. ... Why? Some have suggested it’s a greater respect for thinking, which readily becomes an unhelpful tautology. Linda Skitka of the University of Illinois emphasizes how the personal attributions of snap judgments readily feel dissonant to liberals, at odds with their principles; thus they are motivated to think their way to a more consonant view. In contrast, even with more time, conservatives don’t become more situational, because there’s no dissonance.

Putin had launched “a new form of warfare” in which the human mind was the main battlefront, a comprehensive assessment by the Modern War Institute at West Point concluded a decade later. Using disinformation and deception, “Russia created the time and space to shape the international narrative in the critical early days of the conflict.” The West Point study saw four essential elements of Russian information warfare on display in Georgia and thereafter: “First, and most benignly, it aims to put the best spin it can on ordinary news; second, it incites a population with fake information in order to prep a battlefield; third, it uses disinformation or creates enough ambiguity to confuse people on the battlefield; and fourth, it outright lies.” The overarching Russian strategy was “to degrade trust in institutions across the world.

First, because, in the first case, the right of conquest being in fact no right at all, it could not serve as a foundation for any other right, the conqueror and the conquered ever remaining with respect to each other in a state of war, unless the conquered, restored to the full possession of their liberty, should freely choose their conqueror for their chief. Till then, whatever capitulations might have been made between them, as these capitulations were founded upon violence, and of course de facto null and void, there could not have existed in this hypothesis either a true society, or a political body, or any other law but that of the strongest. Second, because these words strong and weak, are ambiguous in the second case; for during the interval between the establishment of the right of property or prior occupation and that of political government, the meaning of these terms is better expressed by the words poor and rich, as before the establishment of laws men in reality had no other means of reducing their equals, but by invading the property of these equals, or by parting with some of their own property to them. Third, because the poor having nothing but their liberty to lose, it would have been the height of madness in them to give up willingly the only blessing they had left without obtaining some consideration for it: whereas the rich being sensible, if I may say so, in every part of their possessions, it was much easier to do them mischief, and therefore more incumbent upon them to guard against it; and because, in fine, it is but reasonable to suppose, that a thing has been invented by him to whom it could be of service rather than by him to whom it must prove detrimental.

The techno-political thriller and the romance novel serve as antidotes to the imagination rather than stimulants to it. For this reason they make for ideal reading in airports and airplanes. They effectively shut down the imagination by doing all its work for it. They leave the spirit or the soul—and ambiguity, for that matter—out of the equation. By shutting down the imagination, genre novels perform a useful service to the anxious air traveler by reducing his or her ability to speculate. For the most part, people on airplanes, and here I include myself, would rather not use their speculative imaginations at all; one consequence of this situation is that great poetry is virtually unreadable during turbulence, when the snack cart has been put away and the seat belts fastened. Enough anxiety is associated with air travel without Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus making it worse.

If the fusion of the Commissar and the Yogi were realized, there would be a self-criticism in the man of action which would expose to him the ambiguity of his will, thus arresting the imperious drive of his subjectivity and, by the same token, contesting the unconditioned value of the goal. But the fact is that the politician follows the line of least resistance; it is easy to fall asleep over the unhappiness of others and to count it for very little; it is easier to throw a hundred men, ninety-seven of whom are innocent, into prison, than to discover the three culprits who are hidden among them; it is easier to kill a man than to keep a close watch on him; all politics makes use of the police, which officially flaunts its radical contempt for the individual and which loves violence for its own sake. The thing that goes by the name of political necessity is in part the laziness and brutality of the police.

Back in the twentieth century, American girls had used baseball terminology. “First base” referred to embracing and kissing; “second base” referred to groping and fondling and deep, or “French,” kissing, commonly known as “heavy petting”; “third base” referred to fellatio, usually known in polite conversation by the ambiguous term “oral sex”; and “home plate” meant conception-mode intercourse, known familiarly as “going all the way.” In the year 2000, in the era of hooking up, “first base” meant deep kissing (“tonsil hockey”), groping, and fondling; “second base” meant oral sex; “third base” meant going all the way; and “home plate” meant learning each other’s names. Getting to home plate was relatively rare, however. The typical Filofax entry in the year 2000 by a girl who had hooked up the night before would be: “Boy with black Wu-Tang T-shirt and cargo pants: O, A, 6.” Or “Stupid cock diesel”—slang for a boy who was muscular from lifting weights—“who kept saying, ‘This is a cool deal’: TTC, 3.” The letters referred to the sexual acts performed (e.g., TTC for “that thing with the cup”), and the Arabic number indicated the degree of satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10. In the year 2000, girls used “score” as an active verb indicating sexual conquest, as in: “The whole thing was like very sketchy, but I scored that diesel who said he was gonna go home and caff up [drink coffee in order to stay awake and study] for the psych test.” In the twentieth century, only boys had used “score” in that fashion, as in: “I finally scored with Susan last night.” That girls were using such a locution points up one of the ironies of the relations between the sexes in the year 2000. The continuing vogue of feminism had made sexual life easier, even insouciant, for men. Women had been persuaded that they should be just as active as men when it came to sexual advances. Men were only too happy to accede to the new order, since it absolved them of all sense of responsibility

في ربيع عام 1989 تم تسريح الضابط ميم من الحرس الجمهوري بعد أن كُسّرت أضلاعه. توقع السيد ميم وهو ضابط شاب ينتمي إلى الطبقة الدنيا المتوسطة, أن يوفر له تعليمه الجامعي الأمن والامتيازات ضمن صفوف الحرس الجمهوري. لقد كان مخطئاً. لم يبد الضابط المسؤول أي احترام لإنجازات ميم, وحتى قبل الحادثة التي أدت به إلى الضرب, كان أصدقاؤه يسمعون بكاءه أثناء نومه. ففي يوم من الأيام زار وحدتهم ضابط برتبة عالية,وأمرهم أن يقصوا عليه أحلامهم التي رأوها في الليلة الفائتة. تقدم مجند وأعلن:"لقد رأيت صورة القائد في السماء, ثم نصبنا سلالم من نار لتقبيلها". وتبعه مجند آخر بقوله:"رأيت القائد ممسكا الشمس بيديه, ثم ضغطها وسحقها حتى تهاوت.فعم الظلام وجه الأرض. ولكن ما لبث وجهه أن لمع في السماء, وأرسل ضياء ودفئاً في كل الاتجاهات".وتتابع الجنود يمدحون بعظمة القائد. عندما جاء دور الضابط ميم, تقدم وحيى المسؤول الكبير, ثم قال:"لقد رأيت في منامي أمي عاهرة في غرفة نومك". ولم يكد ميم ينهي رؤياه حتى انهالوا عليه بالضرب, وتبع ذلك تسريحه. في تعليقه على الحادثة, قال السيد ميم شارحاً "إنه عنى أن بلده عاهرة". وسواء إنبثقت القصة مما حدث بالفعل لميم أو أنها من نسج خيال من رواها, فالحكاية تجد سمة من سمات الحياة السياسية في سورية: إصرار النظام على أن يُقدم المواطنون أدلة ظاهرة على ولائهم لعظمة الحاكم التي لا يمكن تصديق طقوسها الزائفة بشكل جلي. ففي هذه الرواية القوية من مواجهة اعتيادية, يمثل الجنود سياسية "كما لو" وذلك بالإدعاء بأنهم حلموا بالأسد القادر على كل شيء. قد يصدق بعض الجنود أن الأسد ملهم من السماء, لكن من المستبعد أن يتصادف أن أي منهم قد حلم بالقائد في الليلة السابقة. وأما الضابط ذو الرتبة العالية فقد برهن على أنه قادر على إنتزاع قصص خيالية من المشاركين. ويستجيب المشاركون ليبرهنوا على طاعتهم للضابط وعلى قابليتهم في تمثيل كما لو أنهم حلموا بالأسد.لكن وبينما يُطلب من الجنود الإفصاح عن أكثر خصوصيات ذواتهم, يُمكنهم المسؤول الكبير من سرد أكثر القصص المخترعة والتي لا يمكن التحقق منها. يطرح هذا الفصل سؤالين متراطبين: 1) ما هو معنى مشاركة الجنود وماذا يعني التجاوز في قصة ميم؟ولماذا يتم ابتكار استراتيجيات تتطلب من المواطنين الرياء؟ 2) لماذا يتم اعتماد سياسة تستند إلى إظهار الولاء الخارجي الذي يمكن التأكد من زيفه بسهولة, بدلا من مخاطبة القناعة الداخلية للناس؟

What is a novel, anyway? Only a very foolish person would attempt to give a definitive answer to that, beyond stating the more or less obvious facts that it is a literary narrative of some length which purports, on the reverse of the title page, not to be true, but seeks nevertheless to convince its readers that it is. It's typical of the cynicism of our age that, if you write a novel, everyone assumes it's about real people, thinly disguised; but if you write an autobiography everyone assumes you're lying your head off. Part of this is right, because every artist is, among other things, a con-artist. We con-artists do tell the truth, in a way; but, as Emily Dickenson said, we tell it slant. By indirection we find direction out -- so here, for easy reference, is an elimination-dance list of what novels are not. -- Novels are not sociological textbooks, although they may contain social comment and criticism. -- Novels are not political tracts, although "politics" -- in the sense of human power structures -- is inevitably one of their subjects. But if the author's main design on us is to convert us to something -- - whether that something be Christianity, capitalism, a belief in marriage as the only answer to a maiden's prayer, or feminism, we are likely to sniff it out, and to rebel. As Andre Gide once remarked, "It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written." -- Novels are not how-to books; they will not show you how to conduct a successful life, although some of them may be read this way. Is Pride and Prejudice about how a sensible middle-class nineteenth-century woman can snare an appropriate man with a good income, which is the best she can hope for out of life, given the limitations of her situation? Partly. But not completely. -- Novels are not, primarily, moral tracts. Their characters are not all models of good behaviour -- or, if they are, we probably won't read them. But they are linked with notions of morality, because they are about human beings and human beings divide behaviour into good and bad. The characters judge each other, and the reader judges the characters. However, the success of a novel does not depend on a Not Guilty verdict from the reader. As Keats said, Shakespeare took as much delight in creating Iago -- that arch-villain -- as he did in creating the virtuous Imogen. I would say probably more, and the proof of it is that I'd bet you're more likely to know which play Iago is in. -- But although a novel is not a political tract, a how-to-book, a sociology textbook or a pattern of correct morality, it is also not merely a piece of Art for Art's Sake, divorced from real life. It cannot do without a conception of form and a structure, true, but its roots are in the mud; its flowers, if any, come out of the rawness of its raw materials. -- In short, novels are ambiguous and multi-faceted, not because they're perverse, but because they attempt to grapple with what was once referred to as the human condition, and they do so using a medium which is notoriously slippery -- namely, language itself.

Lying," he said out loud, hoping no one would hear. "I need to lie. Teach me, quickly." I wouldn't if I were you, came the response. For a start, it's a variable concept here. You are in a culture where ambiguity has been raised to a high level. Let me give an example: depending on phrasing, circumstance, expression, body movement, intonation and context, the statement "I love you" can mean I love you; I don't love you; I hate you; I want to have sex with you; I do, in fact, love your sister; I don't love you any more; leave me alone, I'm tired, or I'm sorry I forgot your birthday. The person being talked to would instantly understand the meaning but might choose to attribute an entirely different meaning to the statement. Lying is a social act and the nature and import of the lie depends in effect on an unspoken agreement between the parties concerned. Please note that this description does not even begin to explore the concept of deep lies, in which the speaker simultaneously says something he knows to be untrue and genuinely believes it nonetheless: politicians are particularly adept at this.

All political parties have some sort of ‘vested interest’ in their opponent’s unpopular moves. They live by them and are therefore liable to dwell upon, to emphasize, and even to look forward to them. They may even encourage the political mistakes of their opponents as long as they can do so without becoming involved in the responsibility for them. This, together with Engels’ theory, has led some Marxist parties to look forward to the political moves made by their opponents against democracy. Instead of fighting such moves tooth and nail, they were pleased to tell their followers: ‘See what these people do. That is what they call democracy. That is what they call freedom and equality! Remember it when the day of reckoning comes.’ (An ambiguous phrase which may refer to election day or to the day of revolution.) This policy of letting one’s opponents expose themselves must, if extended to moves against democracy, lead to disaster. It is a policy of talking big and doing nothing in the face of real and increasing danger to democratic institutions. It is a policy of talking war and acting peace; and it taught the fascists the invaluable method of talking peace and acting war.

What to read? Any good novel enlivens our ability to think about ambiguous situations and judge the intentions of others. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being might suit our moment. Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here is perhaps not a great work of art; Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is better. One novel known by millions of young Americans that offers an account of tyranny and resistance is J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. If you or your friends or your children did not read it that way the first time, then it bears reading again. Some of the political and historical texts that inform the arguments made here are “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell (1946); The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (1947); The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951); The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951); The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953); “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel (1978); “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist” by Leszek Kołakowski (1978); The Uses of Adversity by Timothy Garton Ash (1989); The Burden of Responsibility by Tony Judt (1998); Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning (1992); and Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (2014).

The prevailing inability or unwillingness to talk about Hamas in a nuanced manner is deeply familiar. During the summer of 2014, when global newsrooms were covering Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip, I watched Palestinian analysts being rudely silenced on the air for failing to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization outright. This condemnation was demanded as a prerequisite for the right of these analysts to engage in any debate about the events on the ground. There was no other explanation, it seemed, for the loss of life in Gaza and Israel other than pure-and-simple Palestinian hatred and bloodlust, embodied by Hamas. I wondered how many lives, both Palestinian and Israeli, have been lost or marred by this refusal to engage with the drivers of Palestinian resistance, of which Hamas is only one facet. I considered the elision of the broader historical and political context of the Palestinian struggle in most conversations regarding Hamas. Whether condemnation or support, it felt to me, many of the views I faced on Palestinian armed resistance were unburdened by moral angst or ambiguity. There was often a certainty or a conviction about resistance that was too easily forthcoming. I have struggled to find such. I have struggled to find such certainty in my own study of Hamas, even as I remain unwavering in my condemnation of targeting civilians, on either side.

Intellectuals and manufactured problems The greater a persons knowledge of political and economic facts, the more sensitive and vulnerable is his judgment. Intellectuals are most easily reached by propaganda, particularly if it employs ambiguity. The reader of a number ol newspapers expressing diverse attitude — just because he is better informed - is more subjected than anyone else to a propaganda that he cannot perceive, even though he claims to retain free choice in the mastery of all this information. Actually, he is being conditioned to absorb all the propaganda that coordinates and explains the facts he believes himself to be mastering. Thus, information not only provides the basis for propaganda but gives propaganda the means to operate; for information actually generates the problems that propaganda exploits and for which it pretends to offer solutions. In fact, no propaganda can work until the moment when a set of facts has become a problem in the eyes of those who constitute public opinion. At the moment such problems begin to confront public opinion, propaganda on the part of a government, a party, or a man can begin to develop fully by magnifying that problem on the one hand and promising solutions for it on the other. But propaganda cannot easily create a political or economic problem out of nothing. There must be some reason in reality. The problem need not actually exist, but there must be a reason why it might exist.

ثم نشرت الصحيفة تحت الرسالة تقارير أخرى لمسؤولين في المنظمات الرسمية. وقدمت كل منظمة تفسيرا منسجما مع الآخرين, وساعدت في تحديد ما سيكون المعيار والمقبول. فقط ربط اتحاد الفلاحين الأحداث في حماة بضم إسرائيل لهضبة الجولان ومؤامرات أخرى مشابهة. وعبر "رجال الدين" في حماة عن رفضهم للإخوان المسلمين لأنهم قتلوا نساء وأطفالاً أبرياء باسم الدين. وأدانت منظمة طلائع البعث التدخل الأميركي في الشؤون الداخلية السورية. وادعت منظمة الشبيبة بأن حركة الإخوان المسلمين قد "باعت نفسها للشيطان". وفي اليوم التالي روت "نساء حماة" كيف شهدن "الخوف" من "وحوش الإخوان المسلمين", الأمر الذي تطلب أن يقتل (النظام) أعضاءها "دون رحمة أو هوادة لأنهم لا يستحقون الرحمة"."جماهير النساء في حماة", "كل الأمهات في حماة ترفض الجرائهم النكراء للأخوان المسلمين" وتسأل الأسد "أن يحمي الوطن" من جرائمهم.والتفّت كل المنظمات المهنية واتحادات البعث الأخرى حول حافظ الأسد وأعطت ولاءها له.وقدمت كل الصحف السورية تقارير عن توقيع المبايعات التي تؤكد ولاء الجماهير للأسد. واستمرت مثل هذه الرسائل والعهود خلال الأيام التي تلت , وأظهرت بأن الأعضاء في هذه المنظمات (الشعبية) يمكن أن يكرروا هذه الطقوس مع تنوع لا حصر له لهذا الموضوع الوحيد. وضمن الحدود الواسعة للأحداث المعلنة, مثل وقوع أحداث العنف في حماة, كان هناك مجال لتأسيس رواية النظام للحقيقة – حقيقة حولا الصراع إلى التماسك,وبشكل نهائي غير إشكالي. أبقى الأسد ذاته على مستوى متدن من الظهور على غير المعتاد في شباط أثناء إندلاع الأحداث, ليعود فيظهر فقط عندما إنحسر العنف. وركزت الصحف على الأحداث وعملت على تبرير رد النظام من خلال إنتاج صور "الخيانة". في يوم 26 شباط, عرضت الصحف صورا لأسلحة مكدسة جُمعت افتراضاً من الإخوان المسلمين, لتؤكد إدعاءات النظام بأن الإخوان كانوا يشكلون تهديدا.هذه الصور, إضافة إلى صور الناس الذين قيل إنهم قُتلوا بهجمات الإخوان, ظهرت لاحقا في مجموعة من أربعة مجلدات, تعرض رواية النظام لعلاقته مع الإخوان المسلمين. فقط لان ظاهرة تعظيم الحاكم يمكن أن تظهر وتختفي يمكن للأسد أن يكون: (1) القائد الحاضر في كل مكان وهو مسؤول عن الأحداث التي توحد وتجلب المجد للسوريين (2) غائبا عن وبريئا من الأحداث المخجلة أو ببساطة ذات الطبيعة الصراعية. عاد الأسد وظهر يوم 8 آذار في وسائل الإعلام العامة. كانت العناوين تحتفل بثورة البعث التي تم إحياء ذكراها في ذاك اليوم. إجتمع أكثر من مليون ونصف المليون سوري حسب التقارير لتحية الأسد في شوارع دمشق. وصُور الأسد وسط جماهير المعجبين, لكنه مرفوع على الأكتاف. وقد ارتفعت الأذرع محاولة لمسه. وتعرض الأسد, في هذه المناسبة, لـ"جرائم" الإخوان المسلمين وحذر السوريين ليكونوا واعين من أولئك "اللذين يلبسون ثوب الإسلام" لكنهم غير مسلمين. إن تصوير النظام لأحداث حماة يظهر الطرق التي من خلالها يملأ السرد الرسمي المجال العام ويزود صيغة للحديث العام. فقد قدم النظام الخطاب البلاغي المثالي حتى يتم تقليده وبالتالي يقدم توجيهات للمعلقين المحتملين. ويوصل الخطاب أيضا عدم تساهله تجاه الرموز والنقاشات واللغة البديلة. إن مرونة البلاغة الإنشائية تسمح للتعريفات بأن تبقى زلقة, وتستخدم التناقض والمبالغة لتشكيل أحداث مؤطرة معدة سلفاً, تشمل افتراضات الوحدة الوئامية, وتحكّم البعث, وعصمة الأسد.

تمثل الطرق التي من خلالها تم عرض أحداث حماة كيف يستخدم النظام إبلاغ الحقيقة جزئيا, والممنوعات في الحديث, واستخدام الرموز والتصوير لإعطاء صيغة فهم توافقية للتعبير العام المناسب حول الصراع. ولعل أحداث حماة تمثل الصراع الداخلي الأهم أثناء فترة حكم حافظ الأسد, لم يكن ممكنا تجاهل الأحداث بشكل مطلق, كما أنها استدعت تفسيرا رسميا عاماً شمل الخطاب البلاغي الذي يتهم الصهيونية والأمريكان بالتدخل في الشؤون الداخلية لسورية وجعل الإخوان كعملاء للإمبريالية الغربية, مع ذلك, فلقد ذهب التفسير إلى أبعد مما هو معتاد في البلاغة المعهودة وأفشى بعض التفاصيل الجزئية حول ما حصل. يكشف اختيار التفاصيل كيف قدم النظام تفاصيل تجعله آمنا أثناء الأوقات العصيبة, وذلك بإعلان شروط العضوية الوطينة وأيضا باستجواب "المواطنين" حول الخطاب, وذلك من خلال تقديم مجال ليساهموا بإعادة إنتاجه.

نشرت صحيفة البعث رسالة من قائد شعبة حزب البعث في حماة بتاريخ 23 شباط 1982 يقدم فيها تفسيرا رسميا للمعركة, تصف الرسالة كيف أن القوات الحكومية تعرضت لكمين أثناء قيامها بتمشيط يوم 2 شباط. وتعترف الرسالة بأن المعركة المستعرة قد أوقفت الأنشطة الاقتصادية في حماة وأن المحلات قد أحرقت وأن نساءً وأطفالاً قُتلوا. يؤسس الخطاب البلاغي لسلطة البعث وأنه الضحية على يد العدو:"استيقظ شعبنا في حماة يوم 3 شباط على صوت المؤامرة" ولقد جاء هذا الصوت من "أعداء الله والإسلام". لقد أطلق الإخوان الرصاص من "مساجد الله" ومن عدد من أحياء المدينة. "وقتلوا بوحشية جميع المواطنين الذين لم يفتحوا أبواب بيوتهم لهم. وقد قتلوا من استطاعوا من النساء والأطفال .. إن حقدهم الأسود مثل الكلاب الضالة". لكن الحزب وأجهزة الأمن انتصرت. لقد دافع البعثيون عن أنفسهم "بالروح الثورية والوطنية مقلدين أخلاقيات الفارس العربي". لقد استطاع "فرسان البعث الدفاع عن أنفسهم وعوائلهم وجماهير الشعب والوطن".واختتمت الرسالة بالتأكيد على الولاء للأسد ولله. وهكذا فقد وحد الحزب بعلمانيته,في مواجهة تحدي الإخوان المسلمين, وجد نفسه أيضا يتملق إلى الله. وكان الله , من ناحيته, إلى جانب الحزب.

إن دور الأسد كأب (بطريارك) وطني يضعه رمزا في موقع الشخصية المسيطرة في المجتمع الهرمي, ويدين المواطنون – الأولاد له بالطاعة. لكن استحضار الأسد في هذا الدور كأب وطني يملي أيضا مسؤوليته ليزود الاحتياجيات المادية للمواطنين- الأولاد السوريين. وإلى درجة التي يشخص فيها الأسد مؤسسات الدولة التي من المفروض أن تزود السلع والخدمات مقابل الطاعة والولاء, فإن مجاز الأب يعمل ليؤكد على أن الأسد مثل الأب العائلي: مشابه لكنه أكبر وأفضل وأقوى من أب الأفراد.

في حالة سورية, إن تحديد الطرق التي من خلالها تعمل ظاهرة تقديس الأسد لتضبط المواطنين من خلال فرض الطاعة, وتحريض الامتثال, وعزل المشاركين, كل ذلك يمكننا من تقييم الطرق التي من خلالها يمكن للتجاوزات أن تُقوّض بعضا من جوانب سلطة النظام بينما تعزز جوانب أخرى. وبالعكس, فإن تفسير التجاوزات يمكن أن يساعدنا للوصول إلى فهم مختلف دقيق للطرق التي تعمل من خلالها السلطة. فأنظمة السيطرة أبدا غير كاملة, والأشكال اليومية للمقاومة تقترح الطرق الجزئية وغير الكاملة التي تُمثّل وتُنتَج من خلالها السلطة في سورية.

إن ظاهرة عدم التسيس التي يقال إنها بدأت عندما اتحدت سورية مع مصر عام 1958, أصبحت واضحة بشكل متزايد بعد الإنفصال, وخاصة تحت احتكار حزب البعث للحكم عام 1963. ومع ذلك, فإن حكم البعث لم يكن متماسكا في بدايته, كما استمرت تيارات المعارضة بأنشطتها.ولم نُلاحظ ظاهرة عدم التسييس في الحياة العامة بشكل واضح,حتى عام 1970 تحت حكم الأسد. استخدم الأسد وسائل متعددة ليثني المعارضة السياسية: فلقد أنفق الموارد وأعطى الحوافز لأولئك الذين رفضوا الالتزام بهذه القواعد. ومثل أغلبية, الدول القومية المُتشكلة حديثا, إن لم يكن كلها, حاولت سورية أن تجد حلولاً بالتفاوض, للخلافات الإثنية والسياسية في ظل ظروف بناء الدولة - الأمة, لتحافظ على السلم الاجتماعي, ولتحول طاقات النظام التدميرية المحتملة إلى خطوط بنّاءة. وكان جزءاً مهماً من هذه المفاوضات حول العالم الرمزي, عندما يحاول النظام إدارة المعاني بشكل منسجم مع النظام المدني ويساهم بإنتاجه.

إن الأسد قوي لأن الناس يتعاملون معه على أنه قوي, فالعروض أدوار يؤديها الناس معتبريته قويا, وبذا يساعدون على جعله كذلك. فلا تزود العروض مناسبة لفرض الطاعة فقط, بل أيضا تعبّر عن استخدامها, وبذا تعمل لخلق عقلية من الوهن الشعبي الذي يساعد على تجديد سلطة النظام. وكلما زادت درجة سخافة الأداء المطلوب, كلما برهنت بجلاء أن النظام يمكن أن يجعل أغلب الناس يطيعون في معظم الأوقات.

إذا كانت ظاهرة تقديس الأسد تحد من العنف البوليسي من النظام, فإن الحساسيات المشتركة لعدم التصديق مع الأعمال المسرحية الساخرة والأفلام والنكات قد تحد أيضا من احتمالات العنف المضاد.

إن غياب ظاهرة التقديس (بعد حافظ الأسد على سبيل المثال) يعني على الأغلب أن أشكالاً أخرى من التحكم الإنضباطي مطلوبة لإدامة الطاعة.وقد يزيد نظام ما بعد الأسد استخدام القوة الوحشية, أو يمكن أن يُقدم آليات ليبرالية للسوق الحرة كطريقة أخرى للتحكم بالمواطنين.أو قد يخسر السلطة.

إن ظاهرة تقديس الأسد هي جزء من الطريقة التي يحاول النظام بها إدارة المنافسة حول المعاني. إذ بممارسة قدرته على الاستحواذ على المعاني وبإصراره على استقرار الإشارات الآني, فإن النظام يُعلن عن قوته. وبتقديم قوته, يُخلق النظام من جديد, ويمسك بشكل دائم بالشروط التي تُنتج امتثال المواطنين.

يُظهر مثال سورية الآثار المتناقضة للآليات الرمزية للتحكم الاجتماعي. من ناحية, فإن لظاهرة تقديس الحاكم مجازفة, فهي تدعو إلى التمرد الذي تحاول التحكم به. ومن ناحية ثانية, فإن طرق المقاومة المتوفرة لأغلبية السوريين, مع أنها شجاعة وخلاقة بشكل متكرر, هذه الطرق بحد ذاتها غير قادرة على تغيير "نظام الأشياء" بشكل هام. وتبقى هذه الأشكال من التجاوزات, مع ذلك, مهمة: فإدراك الشروط المشتركة لعدم التصديق, وخلق أسس للبدائل, وإدامة رُؤى للمجموعة وللإنسانية, يوجد لها دائما إمكانية للتحقيق السياسي. وحقيقة أن التغيير يحدث, مع أنه غالبا ودائما بالإشارة إلى لغة ورموز الماضي, فهو يوضح قوة الآليات الرمزية للتحكم. كما أن حقيقة أن النظام لا يستطيع التحكم تماما بالإشارات أو المعاني لرموزه. تُظهر الجوانب غير الواضحة والمُتنازع عليها لأي مشروع رمزي. وبكلمات أخرى تدل التجربة السورية على الأهمية السياسية المحورية للآليات الرمزية للتحكم الاجتماعي. هذه النتائج لا تعني أنه لايوجد قائد كاريزماتي أو أن كل الأنظمة تعمل من دون اشتراط القناعة, أو أن الرموز تفشل في إنتاج مشاعر الولاء والحب للحاكم لدى المحكومين, كما يدعي بعض طلاب الأنظمة الفاشية بفشل الرموز. بدلا من ذلك , تُجادل هذه الدراسة بأن اللغة والرموز أساسية سياسياً في غياب القناعة والولاء.

She made only one educational stipulation: religious instruction. Unlike Aziz, who was racked by ambiguity, she had remained devout. 'You have your Hummingbird,' she told him, 'but I, whatsitsname, have the Call of God. A better noise, whatsitsname, than that man's hum.' It was one of her rare political comments… and then the day arrived when Aziz threw out the religious tutor.

It had been often commented upon that Vibe offspring tended to be crazy as bedbugs. ‘Fax’s brother Cragmont had run away with a trapeze girl, then brought her back to New York to get married, the wedding being actually performed on trapezes, groom and best man, dressed in tails and silk opera hats held on with elastic, swinging upside down by their knees in perfect synchrony across the perilous Æther to meet the bride and her father, a carnival “jointee” or concessionaire, in matched excursion from their own side of the ring, bridesmaids observed at every hand up twirling by their chins in billows of spangling, forty feet above the faces of the guests, feathers dyed a deep acid green sweeping and stirring the cigar smoke rising from the crowd. Cragmont Vibe was but thirteen that circus summer he became a husband and began what would become, even for the day, an enormous family. The third brother, Fleetwood, best man at this ceremony, had also got out of the house early, fast-talking his way onto an expedition heading for Africa. He kept as clear of political games as of any real scientific inquiry, preferring to take the title of “Explorer” literally, and do nothing but explore. It did not hurt Fleetwood’s chances that a hefty Vibe trust fund was there to pick up the bills for bespoke pith helmets and meat lozenges and so forth. Kit met him one spring weekend out at the Vibe manor on Long Island. “Say, but you’ve never seen our cottage,” ‘Fax said one day after classes. “What are you doing this weekend? Unless there’s another factory girl or pizza princess or something in the works.” “Do I use that tone of voice about the Seven Sisters material you specialize in?” “I’ve nothing against the newer races,” ‘Fax protested. “But you might like to meet Cousin Dittany anyway.” “The one at Smith.” “Mount Holyoke, actually.” “Can’t wait.” They arrived under a dourly overcast sky. Even in cheerier illumination, the Vibe mansion would have registered as a place best kept clear of—four stories tall, square, unadorned, dark stone facing looking much older than the known date of construction. Despite its aspect of abandonment, an uneasy tenancy was still pursued within, perhaps by some collateral branch of Vibes . . . it was unclear. There was the matter of the second floor. Only the servants were allowed there. It “belonged,” in some way nobody was eager to specify, to previous occupants. “Someone’s living there?” “Someone’s there.” . . . from time to time, a door swinging shut on a glimpse of back stairway, a muffled footfall . . . an ambiguous movement across a distant doorframe . . . a threat of somehow being obliged to perform a daily search through the forbidden level, just at dusk, so detailed that contact with the unseen occupants, in some form, at some unannounced moment, would be inevitable . . . all dustless and tidy, shadows in permanent possession, window-drapes and upholstery in deep hues of green, claret, and indigo, servants who did not speak, who would or could not meet one’s gaze . . . and in the next room, the next instant, waiting . . . “Real nice of you to have me here, folks,” chirped Kit at breakfast. “Fellow sleeps like a top. Well, except . . .” Pause in the orderly gobbling and scarfing. Interest from all around the table. “I mean, who came in the room in the middle of the night like that?” “You’re sure,” said Scarsdale, “it wasn’t just the wind, or the place settling.” “They were walking around, like they were looking for something.” Glances were exchanged, failed to be exchanged, were sent out but not returned. “Kit, you haven’t seen the stables yet,” Cousin Dittany offered at last. “Wouldn’t you like to go riding?

As this study has shown, the modern subject had a long and painful birth. Individualism arose neither fully formed nor without opposition, but through intense conflicts and unprecedented conjunctures. Indeed, as late as 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville could still remark on the sheer novelty of the term individualisme in French.8 The gradual acceptance in France of the idea of the individualist self—defined by personal identity, autonomy, and agency—hinged on the matter of the human person’s relationship to spiritual, existential, and material goods. Without establishing the self’s owner- ship of its thoughts and actions along with its belongings, property in all its forms would remain insecure. The Thermidorean reaction neutralized the dispossessive politics that dominated France for a brief, bloody phase during the Year II, and the regimes that followed reaf rmed their commitment to the institutionalization of property rights established in 1789. During the postrevolutionary period, defenders of self-ownership set about fashioning their ideals into a coherent political, economic, and pedagogical framework. It is more than telling that “individualism” only entered into common usage at this time. Even then, the term carried mainly negative connotations. The modern self—whether known as the moi, the individu, or by any other name—would continue to bear the ambiguities of its origins.

The approach of The Authoritarian Personality overlaps quite a bit with our theories of intuitive politics. As with magical thinking, authoritarianism is a nonrational way of viewing the world. It is based more on gut feelings, albeit rather dark ones, than on general principles. Like Intuitionists, authoritarians hold Manichaean notions of good and evil, believe strongly in rigid gender roles and immanent justice, and are intolerant of ambiguity and abstract thinking.13 Even more striking is the importance of anxiety. Just like magical beliefs, authoritarianism appears to be largely triggered by feelings of threat. There is strong evidence that authoritarianism is a latent predisposition that gets activated in stressful circumstances.

The emphasis on individual rights has heightened awareness of social discrimination and gender inequality; in many countries today, there is a remarkable greater acceptance of different sexual orientations. The larger political implications of this revolutionary individualism, however, are much more ambiguous.

He said a political writer must be careful. He quoted Auden: A writer's politics are more dangerous to him than his cupidity. He said, Political sentimentality is as bad as any other kind. You have to acknowledge ambiguity, complexity. There is a kind of death that creeps into your prose when you're trying to illustrate a principle, no matter how worthy.

As we will see, the ‘whiteness’ of Jews, especially in the USA, as of Italians and the Irish too, has actually been gradually achieved in the 20th century as part of a social and political process of inclusion. As ‘semites’, but also as ‘orientals’, Jews were often regarded as not belonging to white races, while it was not uncommon in the 19th century for the English and Americans to regard the Irish as ‘black’ and for Italians to have an ambiguous status between white and black in the USA.

I have no problem apologizing when I am wrong, I'm just never wrong because I don't pretend that I am right about things I do not know or that can be ambiguous. I do not debate opinion, religion, or politics. Nobody knows the answer, you are always 50% wrong.

The difference between a mind asking “Must I believe it?” versus “Can I believe it?” is so profound that it even influences visual perception. Subjects who thought that they’d get something good if a computer flashed up a letter rather than a number were more likely to see the ambiguous figure as the letter B, rather than as the number 13.

If people can literally see what they want to see—given a bit of ambiguity—is it any wonder that scientific studies often fail to persuade the general public?

Postmodernity” as the “end of grand narratives” is one of the names for this predicament in which the multitude of local fictions thrives against the background of scientific discourse as the only remaining universality deprived of sense. Which is why the politics advocated by many a leftist today, that of countering the devastating world-dissolving effect of capitalist modernization by inventing new fictions, imagining “new worlds” (like the Porto Alegre slogan “Another world is possible!”), is inadequate or, at least, profoundly ambiguous: it all depends on how these fictions relate to the underlying Real of capitalism—do they just supplement it with the imaginary multitude, as the postmodern “local narratives” do, or do they disturb its functioning? In other words, the task is to produce a symbolic fiction (a truth) that intervenes into the Real, that causes a change within it.29