In Captive Thought, one of the important anti-totalitarian books written in the 20th century, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz used the metaphor of Murty Bing’s pills to explain the acceptance of communist myths by many intelligent intellectuals. A type of self-induced blindness. Pretending as a mental sport. It is not about stupidity, but about the self-emasculation of the critical spirit. A vertical creature becomes a crawling creature. “Mon Parti m’a rendu les couleurs de la France”, majesty written by Paul Eluard. Or maybe Aragon, it doesn’t even matter… French sociologist, political scientist and philosopher Raymond Aron paraphrased Karl Marx’s statement about religion, writing the book “Opium of Intellectuals”.

Czech dissident playwright Vaclav Havel promoted and practiced living in truth. They are vivid examples of the ability to break through the smokescreen of ideology. In recent years, humanity has faced two planetary dangers: the pandemic and the aggressive expansionism of Putin’s empire. For various reasons, some have chosen to develop theories that challenge the medical and democratic consensus. Both are prerequisites for resistance to Evil: natural and political. I do not venture hic et nunc to explore these positions, I avoid the temptation of intention processes. I don’t like it when they are done to me, I don’t want to apply it to others. But I’ve studied the illogical logic of conspiracy theories for decades, I’ve explored the ways in which myth, magic, and wonder merge into mystifying demystifications.

Those who fabricated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion themselves conspired under the auspices of the Ohran (Royal Political Police) to create the myth. An imaginary conversation from hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, the conspiratorial fantasy of a slightly frightened French lawyer (Maurice Jolly) became “the world conspiracy of the Jews”. The Baltic German architect Alfred Rosenberg read the work and bought all the stories about the plans of the Jewish plutocracy. His indigestible book, The Myth of the 20th Century, was a racist manifesto with metaphysical pretensions. Even Hitler did not read it to the end. Rosenberg was the Reichsminister for Eastern Territories. He was hanged in Nuremberg. What can we do to avoid the temptation mentioned in the first lines of this text? Let’s stay true to that way of relating to the world and others, which the British liberal thinker Isaiah Berlin called a sense of reality (sense of reality). This is the only way we will manage not to feel like “guinea pigs” when vaccinating against Covid. This is the only way we do not confuse the victim and the executioner in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Some people don’t like the phrase moral clarity. Let’s call him, together with Andriy Pleshu, a moral discriminator. The article appeared on Contributors.ro