This leprosy is killing us it is doubtful whether it can be cured…”. This is an intellectual leprosy it originated in the political world and then spread through the land, contaminating all forms of thinking. Such a choice replaces the activity of the mind. “Nearly everywhere instead of thinking one merely takes sides: for or against. Consider, for example, the following insight from her 1943 essay (now in small-book form titled On the Abolition of All Political Parties): Then again, sometimes it takes an outsider to alert us to what we cannot see within the confines of our own political predicament. Start there, and you can begin to understand why Simone Weil (1909-1943) called for the abolition of political parties. In this domain, political parties become ends in themselves, as if they embodied all truth. It is a dimension of mind, a dormant mind, in which the truths of the party defy all other truths, where party loyalty trumps all other loyalties, and where the party line is the line to be toed. In contemporary America, the signposts point to George Orwell’s 1984, that dystopian society where contradictions are etched in stone, and where truth is its opposite.
It was their final, most essential command.”
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
