“The human psyche and human nature are artful dodgers.”
Sen. Anne Cools in a speech in the Senate March 13, 2001, quoted in Hansard Vol. 139
In my latest National Post column I pick up on the Post’s fall series “A Serious Canada” to lament just how unserious a look at a typical newspaper front page reveals us to be on everything from Chinese Communist aggression to budgeting to open government.
“In 1945... the vaunted thousand-year rule of the Third Reich came to a brutal end. Great cities lay in ruins. Millions were exterminated; millions more were displaced and starving. A demon in human flesh had put the whole apparatus of the modern state to work to eradicate God’s people. The last victim of every murderous demon is its human host, so staying true to Satanic form, in the final days of war, Hitler and his leading Nazi henchman pulled the trigger on their own demise.”
David Kitz Psalms Alive!
“the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.”
Fyodor Dostyevsky, quoted by Owen Lippert in Fraser Forum July 2000
On March 27 in a Christian Heritage Party webinar talk “Magna Lockdown: Canadian Liberty in a Medical Crisis” I argued that liberty isn’t a frivolous luxury or vague abstract ideal but a vital practical tool for creating and maintaining good government in crises as well as quiet times.
“Human nature red in tooth and claw.”
Again I quote myself, swollen in head and pride (from August 2000)
In my latest National Post column I say it’s fatuous to ask companies to stay out of politics; what they need to do, being collections of people, is seek to act morally in public as in private affairs.
“If a rule of the form ‘he who takes the benefit must pay the cost’ is at stake, then solving the problem means spotting cheats. People do this well. The mind is not following abstract reason; it is enforcing a social contract.... Given this view of man – a natural trader, ever concerned with social debts and an uncertain future – it is little wonder that human minds are interested in detecting cheats, not pursuing pure logic, and in sampling frequencies rather than making risky one-off guesses.”
The Economist July 4, 1992 [an article on so-called "Wason tests" some of which people solve far better than others though they are logically equivalent]