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the concept of dignity was invoked,
seem to imply more than it actually did.
created an illusion of a strong view of...
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sleight of hand,
Since the issue of the Universal Declaration dignity has no longer been about obligation, but about claims and entitlements. The new dignity did not oblige people to strive for any moral merits or deserts; it allowed them to submit whatever claims they wished, and to justify these claims by referring to a dignity that they possessed by the mere fact of being born without any moral achievement or effort.
A person who desired to achieve the satisfaction of a pig was thus equally entitled to appeal to dignity to justify his goals as another who tried to follow the path of Socrates, and each time, for a pig and for a Socrates, this was the same dignity. A right to be a pig and a right to be a Socrates were, in fact, equal and stemmed from the same moral (or rather nonmoral, as the new dignity practically broke off with morality) source.
could not lose his dignity, which he had acquired for life simply by being born human.
carried no obligation to do anything particularly good or worthy,
Sinking more and more into arrogant vulgarity, he could argue that this vulgarity not only did not contradict his inborn dignity, but it could even, by a stretch of the imagination, be treated as some sort of an achievement.
In modern times, work became something more than earning means for survival and material security; it was a vocation, which gave human life discipline, meaning, and order.
religious character.
they had to be invested.
people abandoned a deeply embedded desire to seek wealth simply as a means to indulge in expensive and extravagant whims.
Disciplined work became its own proper reward,
minimalistic view of human nature, initially apparent first and foremost in Protestantism
had a specific nature.
was purely religious: a new doctrine of ...
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the low level to which human aspirations were reduced acquired a noble, sometimes even heroic trait, which—let us add—completely disappeared together with the liberalization of the Protestant doctrine.
This paradoxical view of human nature brought about by the Protestant revolution—
At some point, the old capitalism, which had rejected consumerism and owed its success precisely to this rejection, was transformed into a system in which consumption not only came to be accepted, but in fact took control of the entire economic mechanism,
when, by having espoused the classic concept of human nature and releasing all channels of human creativity through the capitalist revolution, it managed to transform spectacularly our civilization and to accomplish extraordinary things in all areas of life.
Mr. Gradgrind
is a despicable figure
liberated itself completely from the Protestant gloom.
The liberal-democratic society abandoned the old time rigor without regret.
entertainment is not just a pastime or a style, but a substance that permeates everything:
Pascal long ago called divertissement:
setting conventional and mostly trivial goals
that would turn our thoughts away from fundamental existential matters.
the conservatives
the Frankfurt School,
were equally alarmed by the extent to which the human mind was degraded and enslaved by what was claimed to be an extremely pleasant, unproblemat...
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first time in the entire history
who thought that not having been surrounded by entertainment from cradle to grave in all areas of life was an anomaly.
Once we assume anthropological minimalism to be a key to understanding today’s liberal democracy,
becomes clear why the liberal democrats wholeheartedly embraced a belief in the inevitability of history.
legitimate offspring of the Enlightenment fai...
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even more committed than the socialis...
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The primary source of the belief in unidirectional history is thus man himself.
where they failed, the liberal democrats proved successful.
ever any system existed that was perfectly tailored to the aspirations of the people inhabiting it, it was liberal democracy,
system will continue to confirm the set of beliefs that the inhabitant of the regime
but also holds to be the only set of beliefs that are worth living by.
All these factors taken together reinforce his belief that if the world is to survive and develop, it must move in one and only one direction—his own.
This view has become contagious,
quickly spread to the communi...
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But in Eastern Europe this was not the case. As if charmed by powerful but invisible political magicians, the East Europeans immediately succumbed to what they considered to be the imperative of the historical development of Western civilization.
after 1989
Poland may be a case in point. Everything indicated that dramatic and painful historical experience should make the Poles particularly suspicious of the new grandiose political projects aiming at restructuring the entire social substance.
Solidarity stood up in defense of human dignity (in its original and not the corrupted sense), access to culture, respect for truth in science and for nobility in art, and a proper role given to Christian heritage and Christian religion.
