Our greatest weakness is the habit of reducing the most complex issues to the most simplistic moralisms. About Communism. About Capitalism. About Crime. About Corruption […] It has made it difficult for Americans to think honestly and to some purpose about themselves and their problems. Moralism drives our thought.
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We have acquired bad habits of speech and worse patterns of behavior, lurching from crisis to crisis with the attention span of a five-year-old. We have never learned to be sufficiently thoughtful about the tasks of running a complex society.
Elections are rarely our finest hours. This is when we tend to be most hysterical, most abusive, least thoughtful about problems, and least respectful of complexity.
[…]A century ago the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt foresaw that ours would be the age of “the great simplifiers,” and that the essence of tyranny was the denial of complexity. He was right. This is the single great temptation of the time. It is the great corruptor, and must be resisted with purpose and with energy.
