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- [link](https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/three-cheers-socialism)
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- > Persons of a reflective bent
- all too often underestimate the enormous strength that truly abysmal [ignorance](#ignorance) can bring.
- [Knowledge is power](#knowledge is power), of course, but—measured by a purely Darwinian calculus—too much knowledge can be a dangerous weakness.
- At the level of the social phenotype (so to speak), the qualities often most conducive to survival are [prejudice](#prejudice), simplemindedness, blind [loyalty](#loyalty), and a militant want of curiosity.
- These are the virtues that fortify us against [doubt](#doubt) or fatal hesitation in moments of crisis.
- [Subtlety](#subtlety) and [imagination](#imagination), by contrast, often enfeeble the will; [ambiguities](#ambiguity) dull the [instincts](#instinct).
- So while it is true that [American](#america) political thought in the main encompasses a ludicrously minuscule range of live options and consists principally in [slogans](#slogans) rather than ideas, this is not necessarily a defect.
- In a nation’s struggle to endure and thrive, unthinking obduracy can be a precious advantage.
- Even so, I think we occasionally take it all a little too far.
- Not long ago, in an op-ed colum...
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- What an opening salvo! I shouldn't trust someone more for writing like this, but it is honed to hit my weak spots.
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- Many other good quotes:
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- > Any day now in [Sweden](#sweden), it seems, free dentistry will mutate into a secret state-police apparatus and a sprawling archipelago of reeducation camps.
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- ***
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- > Just as we Americans have succeeded in turning “[Christianity](#christianity)” into another name for a system of values almost totally antithetical to those of the Gospel, I have every confidence that we will find a way to turn “[socialism](#socialism)” into just another name for late-modern [liberal](#liberalism) [individualism](#individualism).
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- ***
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- > Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon.
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- ***
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- > What remains of that tradition now I cannot say with any certainty. To some extent, it was always a dream of an impossible future sustained by fantasies of a nonexistent past. And some of its aspects, however well-intended—those overly rosy views of class distinction, for instance, or that gauzily gleaming pre-Raphaelite medievalism—are not worth preserving or reviving, except perhaps in radically qualified form.
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