Page 28 - GALIET ILLUSION: Rousseau IV

Holocaust party members did not see with timely acuity what K saw, and Job saw, a system of universal lies, the most dreadful form of poverty, the poverty of spirit, of beauty, of love: the capaciousness not for justice or regard for families, children, humanism, but for barbaric cruelty, where no possible noun or adjective or sentence could survive, if not to drown, to express it. No, Señores. The greatest -ism is the extremism to loose sight of genuine goodness, justice, beauty, and love and wisdom in any politicisms, religionsicisms and philosophisms, be it divinism or secularism, romanticism or classicism, rhizomism or essentialism, or Judaism or Christianism or Islamism. Otherwise, it is best to vote for silentism, or recantism.
In the tragic aftermath of the Peloponnesian War and the Fall of Athens, Plato’s thought experiment of a Philosopher King was a way to flee the Promethean, Faustian or Superhuman will, because Athens had experienced the atrocious: the plummeting infrahuman. Indeed, “to cause pain, to kill, to torture are generally rightly condemned,” says Berlin, but to do so in the name of idealism, or any –ism, “Socialism, Nationalism, Fascism, Communism, or a fanatically held religious belief” is to be repudiated.69 Agreed. Like Celan, Berlin also finds Nazi values detestable.70 Yet, Berlin does not regard the Nazis as “insane, wickedly wrong totally misguided about the facts...in believing that some beings are subhuman, or that race is central,”71 as others do, but he understands how this can occur. He blames “enough misinformation” and “enough false belief about reality,” and “widespread illusion and error,” misleading us all into
69 Berlin, Isaiah. The Power of Ideas. Ed. By Henry Hardy. USA: Princeton University Press, 2000. 14
70 Berlin, Isaiah. The Power of Ideas. Ed. By Henry Hardy. USA: Princeton University Press, 2000. 12
71 Berlin, Isaiah. The Power of Ideas. Ed. By Henry Hardy. USA: Princeton University Press, 2000. 12-13
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