(no subject)
The books of boiled-mutton “philosophy” in the manner of Dr Orison Swett Marden and Dr Frank Crane and the occasional pot-boilers for the newspapers and magazines probably have much the same origin. What appears in them is not a weakness for ideas that are stale and obvious, but a distrust of all ideas whatsoever. The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties. Ergo, one notion is as good as another, and if it happens to be utter flubdub, so much the better-for it is precisely flubdub that penetrates the popular skull with the greatest facility. The way is already made: the hole already gapes. An effort to approach the hidden and baffling truth would simply burden the enterprise with difficulty.
- H L Mencken, Prejudices, First Series
I often look at the political scene in the United States today and despair for the Republic. Surely an electorate as feckless and stupid as ours must spell doom for any democratic nation. Then I pick up Mencken and realize the US has probably always been this way.
Silly me.