--- mkelkar2003 <
smykelkar@...> wrote:
oodles and oodles of stuff, including portions of the
item recently uploaded to the files.
First of all, many thanks to the "Pahrump sage" (:=))
for his useful information about what we have to deal
with here.
As a postscript, some quotes from one of my favourite
political theorists, James Burnham (1905-1987). Cf.
his "Suicide of the West", pp. 103-104, 122-123.
"An ideologue--one who thinks ideologically- can't
lose. He can't lose because his answer, his
interpretation and his attitude have been determined
in advance of the particular experience or
observation. They are derived from the ideology and
are not subject to the facts. There is no possible
argument, observation or experiment that could
disprove a firm ideological belief for the very simple
reason that an ideologue will not accept any argument,
observation or experiment as constituting disproof.
/.../
/.../ It is a characteristic of ideological thinking,
whatever the given ideology, that it cannot be refuted
by logical analysis or empirical evidence. Actually,
the internal logical structure of a developed ideology
is usually quite good anyway, rather like the logical
structure of paranoiac obsessions, which ideologies
resemble in other ways also; and when a logical gap
appears-- as happened to liberalism in the doctrinal
shift from limited to welfare state-- sufficient
ingenuity can always patch it up again, as`we duly
noted. The ideology is a way of interpreting the
world, an attitude toward the world and a method for
dealing with the world. So long as I adhere faithfully
to the ideology there is no specific happening, no
observation or experiment that can unmistakably
contradict it. I can always adjust my categories and
my attitude to allow for whatever it is that happens
or that I observe; if necessary I can shut my eyes."
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