07-29-2016, 03:42 AM
One can learn more faster from book-knowledge in formal education than from learning in the School of Hard Knocks. Book-learning allows one to learn from other people's mistakes. Book-learning may be pointless for teaching creativity and imagination, both of which one has or does not have. Book learning may prevent one from committing gross blunders. Nobody wants to be the new George Armstrong Custer, and no military staff wants any senior officer to be the new George Armstrong Custer.
Every blunder must first seduce with the temptation of brilliance.
The problem isn't that a Custer gets killed; military defeats of reckless soldiers may keep a political order from getting some very bad leaders. It's instead that someone like Custer takes a huge number of people of people down with him.
Every blunder must first seduce with the temptation of brilliance.
The problem isn't that a Custer gets killed; military defeats of reckless soldiers may keep a political order from getting some very bad leaders. It's instead that someone like Custer takes a huge number of people of people down with him.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.