You Can Never Really Understand An Individual

For We Cannot Adequately Understand 'man' As An Isolated Biological Creature, As A Bundle Of Reflexes Or A Set Of Instincts, As An 'intelligible Field' Or A System In And Of Itself. Whatever Else He May Be, Man Is A Social And An Historical Actor Who Must Be Understood, If At All, In Close And Intricate Interplay With Social And Historical Structures

For The First Time In American History, Men In Authority Are Talking About An 'emergency' Without A Foreseeable End... Such Men As These Are Crackpot Realists: In The Name Of Realism They Have Constructed A Paranoid Reality All Their Own.

The Broadening Of The Economic Order Which Came To Be Seated In The Individual Property Owner... Dramatized By Jefferson's Purchase Of The Louisiana Territory... "the Supremacy Of Corporate Economic Power... Consolidated By The Supreme Court Decision Of 1886 Which Declared That The Fourteenth Amendment Protected The Corporation... [the New Deal, Leading To], Within The Political Arena, As Well As In The Corporate World Itself, Competing Centers Of Power That Challenged Those Of The Corporate Directors.

What I Am Asserting Is That In This Particular Epoch A Conjunction Of Historical Circumstances Has Led To The Rise Of An Elite Of Power; That The Men Of The Circles Composing This Elite, Severally And Collectively, Now Make Such Key Decisions As Are Made; And That, Given The Enlargement And The Centralization Of The Means Of Power Now Available, The Decisions That They Make And Fail To Make Carry More Consequences For More People Than Has Ever Been The Case In The World History Of Mankind

The Point Is That We Are Among Those Who Cannot Get Their Mouths Around All The Little Yeses That Add Up To Tacit Acceptance Of A World Run By Crackpot Realists And Subject To Blind Drift. And That, You See, Is Something To Which We Do Belong; We Belong To Those Who Are Still Capable Of Personally Rejecting. Our Minds Are Not Yet Captive.