It's partly the despair-inducing situation of these last two years of political life. It's been enough to make anyone want to give up thinking for themselves. No sooner had one discovered the need for a unified opposition to Trumpism in all forms, than one found in oneself and others the same orneriness and competitiveness that always stood in the way of unity in the past, undimmed by the years and the present crisis. Perhaps catastrophe does not, after all, bring out the best in us -- or not enough of it at once.
Then there is the fact that, if one succeeds in finding for oneself a little niche in the organized (if not quite unified) opposition, then one suddenly -- and for the first time in one's life -- has a stake in something. A reputation to defend. One no longer has the absolute freedom of the outside observer of the human drama, who can criticize anything and everything from the standpoint of individual conscience. And as the enemy becomes all the more repellant (Trump, the alt-right, etc.) then the thought of being seen as wanting in ideological fealty to the opposition becomes all the more intolerable. The loneliness and ugliness of life outside the opposition seems a fate too dreadful to contemplate.
Then there is the fact that, if one succeeds in finding for oneself a little niche in the organized (if not quite unified) opposition, then one suddenly -- and for the first time in one's life -- has a stake in something. A reputation to defend. One no longer has the absolute freedom of the outside observer of the human drama, who can criticize anything and everything from the standpoint of individual conscience. And as the enemy becomes all the more repellant (Trump, the alt-right, etc.) then the thought of being seen as wanting in ideological fealty to the opposition becomes all the more intolerable. The loneliness and ugliness of life outside the opposition seems a fate too dreadful to contemplate.
In short, it's suddenly very easy to see why people found it so hard to think clearly in the 1930s. Why they put up with so much cruelty and nonsense from the Communist Party, say, and found it so nearly impossible to leave.
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In times like these -- the 1930s, today -- the demand to take things on faith is heard especially loudly in relation to criticisms of liberalism. We are asked to shed the liberal consensus and not to spend too much time asking how, why, or whither next. A few random conversations I've had recently, drawn from across the political spectrum:
(1) I am told that so-and-so has a great new critique of the political party system, and indeed of electoral democracy as we know it, that nonetheless manages to avoid totalitarianism and all the known evils of the available alternatives. What it is cannot be conveyed just yet, but I should get in touch with the source when I have a chance.
Note that the higher truths always arrive second-hand. You are never talking to exactly the right person who can explain them to you directly. There is always another link in the chain of transmission. Who you really ought to talk to is so-and-so. They will bring enlightenment. In the meantime, it is better to take it on faith.
(2) Driving in the car with a friend the other day, I am told that he has encountered a great new "economic argument against same-sex marriage." When asked what this might be, he humbly confesses that he would not be able to do it justice, were he to try to convey it to me.
Note that the wisdom is always ineffable. Profane ears cannot receive it, and my friend is too flawed and imperfect a vehicle to transmit the higher truths. Hence, again, it must be taken on faith.
(3) I am exposed to a thoroughgoing critique of modernity. I learn once again of modernity's selfishness, of its individualism, of its savagery and cruelty. I ask the predictable questions about whether people were actually better, or life was better, in the past. I am told that what we should be aiming for in our efforts to transcend modernity is not the pre-modern, but rather, the non-modern. What is the non-modern, and how might we achieve it? I ask. Well, it doesn't exist yet, of course, so it's hard to say. We have to invent it. We are only beginning to conceive its outlines. But we must work toward it. Really, we must.
Note the move that always happens at this point to the realm of the numinous.
Oh, poor liberalism (otherwise known as "modernity," for the purposes of these discussions). It has to answer not only for its own faults, but for those of its enemies as well -- of those who seek to destroy it utterly. Liberalism, for all its imperfections and frustrations, would seem at first glance to have the inarguable advantage, after all, of at least not being fascism and communism. Ah, but that can be easily circumvented. For liberalism, through its imperfections and frustrations, gave rise to fascism and communism! If it had just been more perfect, no one would have felt the need to stray into such odious totalisms in the first place.
And thus, liberalism takes its place in the ever-growing list of non-Nazi ideologies that are accused of being responsible, in some sense, for Nazism. The list so far includes -- by my estimation -- just about every available human belief system that has ever been adopted: liberalism, conservatism, socialism, capitalism, imperialism, Marxism, atheism, Christianity, liberal Protestantism (according to Barth), the Enlightenment (Adorno et. al.), the "Anti-Enlightment Tradition" (Sternhell), scientific rationalism, prescientific irrationalism, environmentalism, modern technologism, Catholicism (Hitler was a Catholic), vegetarianism (Hitler was a vegetarian), animal rights (Hitler was an anti-vivisectionist), meat-eating (Robert Eisler), populism, elitism, democracy, aristocracy, sexual repression (Reich), sexual libertinism, the atomized conditions of modern life, the insufficiently atomized and stiflingly conformist middle-class family structure of interwar German society, etc. etc.
Anyway.
Liberalism seems so omnipresent -- its assumptions so deeply embedded in our political and intellectual culture -- that, like one's parents, it can seemingly be blamed for any present dissatisfaction. We are weened on liberalism as on our mother's milk, as Richard Wright once put it. It made us. It is therefore its distinctive privilege and burden as an ideology to be surrounded by numerous yet ungrateful offspring.
To continue the analogy, it is always easier and more emotionally gratifying to blame liberalism -- as one's parents -- in some nebulous and general way for how things are, rather than to specify what it actually did wrong -- or how it ought to do things differently going forward. With liberalism, as with parents, one wishes to reserve the right to criticize in a general way, without in any way forfeiting any of the nice things that liberalism continues to do for one. One blames while one is on the analyst's couch, yet one still expects that Christmas check every year and occasionally does one's laundry at home.
"Liberalism" thus functions rhetorically in learned social criticism in much the same way that "the government" does in popular American discourse. Everyone is against it, taken as an abstract totality. But when you reduce it down to its constituent functions, people become far less univocal about whether or not it is a good thing. And it becomes far more politically controversial to challenge any one of those functions, the more specific one becomes. "Liberalism" is bad, as everyone knows. But is representative democracy bad? The free exercise clause? Due process and the equal protection of the laws? The First Amendment?
And, if those things are bad, what would you like to see in their place? A federally-enforced hate speech code? An established church? A law making it a criminal offense to post on alt-right websites? Maybe that's what you think, but please tell us, if so. Please dare the ensuing controversy, if that is what you really believe. Just don't hold us in indefinite suspense.
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Recently a friend -- the same friend who failed to perpetrate the above "economic argument" upon me, when invited to do so (see (1))-- forwarded me a book review from The American Conservative. Here we learn, predictably, that the reason we're cursed with Trumpism, etc. is because of the failure of liberalism -- that deadbeat parent, always letting us down. The real problem is "the false anthropology at the heart of the liberal venture," with "Hobbes as a pioneer of this mistaken view." This is the root of our present woes. And what is this false anthropology? Writes our reviewer: "Proto-liberals such as Locke and Jefferson and modern liberals such as Mises and Rawls have all started from a similar place: we are first and foremost human atoms who only need to 'contract' into social groups insofar as it is to our advantage."
Is that what Rawls taught? Is that what I, as a liberal, believe? There are few experiences in intellectual life as disempowering and despair-inducing as being told that you believe something that, in fact, you do not -- at least to the best of your knowledge. One never knows what to do with that. Apart from saying you do not believe any such thing, and never have, you really don't know what else to say. Is it possible to believe something, and not realize it?
Liberalism talks about individual rights because, as an ideology, it is grounded in the assumption of the inviolability, bodily integrity, and equality of every person. The law in a liberal society is set up to enforce these rights, which means mandating (through a system of penalties that are ideally enforced in a fair and impartial way, with full due process) a series of duties that are incumbent upon the other members of the society. Obviously, we have interpersonal, familial, associative, and other obligations to one another in this society that go beyond merely respecting other people's legal rights. But fortunately -- and in line with what our Tocquevillean interlocutor would surely desire-- the state in a liberal society is not in the business of backing up every human obligation by the threat of force.
The logical move that I have always found most difficult to follow is that liberalism is supposed to be in some way withering these extra-legal human obligations, not just failing to enforce them by means of the state. We know that nothing about liberal political views necessarily commits one to the belief that one ought not to make sacrifices for one's family or church or association, etc. These views may necessitate that those sacrifices be made in a spirit of fairness, grounded in a supposition of human equality, but if that is the concern, then we're just arguing about whose "selfishness" is legitimate, and whose is not.
There are, of course, plenty of selfish reasons to want to preserve a patriarchal or heterosexist or traditionalist order. There are a lot of people who benefit from maintaining those orders in their existing or pre-modern forms. Calling the efforts of individuals to assert rights of autonomy and choice against these orders "selfish," but not using the same epithet to describe the efforts of people who benefit in terms of power from subordinating the autonomy and choices of others to these orders, is a bizarrely unjust move. It is also idolatrous, in the sense Reinhold Niebuhr used the word. It denies original sin. It casts one human order as uniquely free of the power motive, and fails to recognize the taint of self-interest in every political position.
Ultimately, there are as many bad and selfish reasons to get married as not, to be in a romantic relationship as not, to have children as not. As Philip Larkin says of an hypothesized married friend: "Wait, not so fast/ Is there such a contrast?/ He was out for his own ends/ Not just pleasing his friends[.]" The way to sort things out, morally, is not to impute a set of "religious" (therefore uniquely lacking in self-interest) motives to people who live in traditional heterosexual and monogamous relationships, while attributing selfishness and hedonism to cultural radicals. The ideals of cultural radicalism are formulated -- whether one agrees with them or not -- with reference to disinterested ideals of justice and fairness, just as much as traditionalists do.
There is no human being utterly lacking in some interest in the self, in the preservation of the self -- the will, at the very least, to survive (it is amusing the speed with which our book reviewer shifts from hectoring Hobbes to -- a paragraph later -- giving a quite Hobbesian account of the human need to form social groups in pre-historical times: "humans (and proto-humans) lived together in tight-knit social groups long before they could have been calculating the advantages of the division of labor. [...] Isolated humans were dead humans, not self-sufficient humans.").
Indeed, there is no conceivable moral system that does not recognize that human beings all do actually have valuable interests that are worth preserving. We want to do good for others because we believe that it is right, in some sense, for people to be happy, to be fed, to be well. When Jesus says that the righteous are those who fed and clothed the least of these, presumably it is because human beings have a legitimate claim to bodily sustenance and survival. The moral question is not whether we have interests. It is whether our interests as human beings are being addressed with fairness, with equality. This is the principle that helps us sort out which interests are legitimate and which are not.
Says Ross Douthat, in his review of the same book: "the liberal-democratic-capitalist matrix we all inhabit depends for its livability and sustainability and decency upon pre-liberal forces and habits, unchosen obligations and allegiances: the communities of tribe and family, the moralism and metaphysical horizons of religion, the aristocracy of philosophy and art. But Deneen comes as a Jeremiah to announce that Tocqueville’s fear that liberalism would eventually dissolve all these inheritances, leaving only a selfish individualism and soft bureaucratic despotism locked in a strange embrace, may now fully be upon us."
The fact that various forms of social life are in fact breaking down in the contemporary United States is fairly indisputable, for anyone who has read Robert Putnam or had more first-hand acquaintance with the realities he describes. The necessary connection to liberalism and modernity implied in the Douthat quote, however, eludes me. Most of the social forms that conservatives would like to maintain only came into existence in a form we would recognize as our own -- the nuclear family, companionate marriage, associative religious life, childhood as an autonomous stage of life from adulthood, the idea that children should live in with their parents and siblings until adulthood -- in the last two hundred years, or slightly longer. By Lawrence Stone's account, family life in -- say -- 18th century Britain bears not the slightest resemblance to any institution that we -- conservatives and liberals alike -- would particularly wish to preserve.
We are fighting, then, over forms of social life that are themselves the products of modernity. And the time horizon of their breakdown would seem not to extend back to the first time the serpent Hobbes offered the apple of atomism in the garden of pre-modern political theory, but rather to the last forty years or so, as neoliberalism and globalization have led to the displacement of traditional industries in the United States and in most parts of the world. Families, communities, and neighborhoods across the world have been forced apart and into new migration patterns, or sheer poverty and stagnation, not because their members are off pursuing dreams of romantic individualism and self-actualization, but because the previous economic opportunities that sustained these ways of life are vanishing.
These conditions are the result of actual policies that have specific destructive consequences in the world. These polices can be reversed through a program of government subsidies to struggling industries and small businesses, transnational labor organizing that raises wage and conditions standards to parity across borders, public investment in health, education, nutrition, and infrastructure, progressive taxation, industrial democracy and Keynesian stimulus.
These are all things that we can actually do. They in no way conflict with liberalism, and indeed stem from its premises. We don't need to disappear into our navels with pledges of "working toward" such imponderable necessities as a "nonmodern" way of life. We can actually get started, right now!
Our book reviewers offer us no such marching orders. They cannot. Because they are unwilling to say what specifically is wrong with liberalism (unless we are defining liberalism as some straw man that no liberal actually believes, such as the belief that "I have no moral obligations apart from my own self-gratitifcation"), they therefore cannot tell us what should be changed about it, and how. They will not say that we should get rid of the Bill of Rights or representative democracy, so we cannot know what precisely should be non-liberal about our future.
Both book reviewers acknowledge this lack of a next step, and both implore themselves, the world, someone to do something about it. But they fail to point the way forward themselves. Says our TAC book reviewer: "Deneen recognizes that what is most needed are new practices and not simply new theories. [...] Deneen’s conclusions track with TAC writer Rod Dreher’s call for a new 'Benedict Option.' Both argue that those aware of the breakdown of the 'liberal world order' must first and foremost strive to create practical, not theoretical, alternatives to the liberal society crumbling around them. Nevertheless, this book provides a sound theoretical basis for their doing so, and that makes it must reading for anyone who recognizes our ongoing crisis."
Yes, we need something to actually do. Ross Douthat wants something to do as well. He tells us so. He ascends in his column through a critique of Deneen's failure to offer anything to do to a bold declaration that someone or other really ought to think of something to do. "At the end, having delivered his indictment, Deneen declines to envision any alternate political order; instead, he rejects ideology and urges a rededication to localism and community, from which some alternative political and economic order might gradually develop," he writes. "[...] Yet if the liberal order is increasingly oppressive and destined to get worse, why would one expect such communities and experiments to flourish, rather than simply being plowed under by the same forces he decries? Surely if there is political life after liberalism, someone will need to step forward and do what the liberal philosophers did several centuries ago — invent the new order, describe the new ideals, urge the specific transformations that future leaders might achieve."
But having run up the curtain so far, Douthat denies us the show. He, apparently, is not the one to tell us what those new ideals, that new political program, might actually be.
We are back in the realm of being asked to take things on faith. We have received the instruction that liberalism is bad, but not what is bad about it, or what or how could be changed in its respect.
Even if I were positively disposed to these ideas to start with, I would surely need more than this to proceed. We are being asked here to develop "practices" that are non-liberal and non-modern. How can we start to do so if we don't know what non-liberalism/non-modernism actually is, and indeed if the very people using the terms deny their ability to define them? The only alternative is to move blindly ahead into a numinous direction that even the leaders who would push us there cannot describe.
This, as David Mamet points out in his book of professional and authorial advice (really a lot of delightful and spot-on kvetching) for his chosen art form, Theatre (2011), is the nature of totalitarian thinking. It is, "the notion that one submerges oneself in a group the purpose of which is action to an end either unquantifiable (change) or unsustainable (world peace)." We are told by the Douthats and Deneens and their kindred on the other side of the political spectrum that the non-liberal future is so far from us and so difficult to conceive that it has not yet been adequately described. Writes Mamet, "What would have prevented them from a clear statement of their goals had those goals been realizable and laudable?"
All of Mamet's examples of totalitarian thinking, of course, derive either from the world of pretentious stage directors, or from the political Left. This book -- Theatre -- was published well this side of Mamet's bizarre and high-profile conversion to American movement conservatism (remember when that happened?).
In a weird way, Mamet's political development makes sense to me. It is always easiest to idealize what is most exotic -- just look at many a 17th-century utopian fantasy. I imagine that being David Mamet, and hanging out with the sorts of people David Mamet probably hangs out with, one has the privilege every day of witnessing the inanities and ideological cruelties of the Left, whereas conservatives are a rare bird that one never glimpses in the flesh. No wonder then that he genuflects so often in the book before Paul Johnson and the person whom he refers to as (ahem), "Our great contemporary philosopher Thomas Sowell."
Mamet's basic point, however, is exactly right. The only path out of this habit of thought is to recognize that we cannot proceed on the basis of ideas that are impossible of expression, that can't be conveyed to anyone, that do not issue into definable changes in concrete reality ("Every difference must make a difference," as William James once put it). Writing of pretentious directors who stage Hamlet in a modern setting, say, Mamet remarks: "What does [this artistic choice] mean? [...] That there are similarities between Indiana and Elsinore? Again all right. But what are they? Note that the director partakes of the totalitarian in allowing us to infer a meaning that is neither present nor articulable."
Comparing political totalitarianism to the practice of psychoanalysis as well as "Method Acting" later in the book, he writes: "the notion is that the human being (or his performance) is infinitely perfectible, given the courage to go deeper[...] But the analysand interested in actually improving his state must ask not, 'How did I get this way?' but, 'What am I going to do about it?'"
The failure to articulate what exactly is wrong, apart from a vague uneasiness, or state what can be done to address it, can of course be found on the Left as much as anywhere. I have no desire to single out Deneen and company for what is a near-universal phenomenon of lazy thinking.
The Left as or more often than anyone fails to tell us what it actually wants, and how we might strive to satisfy its desires (here we are back with the parent/child analogy -- liberalism is to be blamed not only for sometimes failing to do want we want, but for having failed to intuit our desires before we even managed to articulate them. Didn't you know what I need, without me having to say it? Why do I always have to be the one to spell it out? *Tearfully runs up the stairs and slams the bedroom door.*)
There is a great moment in Caroline Blackwood's For All That I Found There -- her first book of characteristically acid-tipped and wickedly funny stories, journalism, and memoirs -- when one of her protagonists is waylaid in traffic by a group of student protestors (this is set in the Vietnam era). "For the love of Christ, what did they think they were demonstrating?" he fumes. "If they were against the War, he was certainly with them. [...] How the Hell could you tell from their placards? 'Love!' 'Love!' 'Politicians take a trip!' How could they expect anyone who was sane to join them for Love?"
Here, among the picket signs for Love, we are safely in the realm of Mamet's "action to an end either unquantifiable [...] or unsustainable."
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Totalitarian thinking intervenes when we have a belief to which we are attached, but which we recognize cannot be rationally defended. This is where the injunction to simply have faith comes in, along with an escalating series of implied social penalties for those who are found wanting in that faith. The more intrinsically preposterous and question-begging the belief in question, the greater must be the mandate of faith, and the stiffer the associated penalties. You only need to harden something into a dogma when you cannot come up with a sound rationale that might persuade someone to adopt it non-violently.
I recall seeing an article in the Guardian recently that proclaims one of the most common and least defensible ideological dogmas of the contemporary Left -- namely, that every allegation of sexual assault must be regarded as true. This is obviously contrary to the spirit of due process and the legal presumption of innocence. The notion that any crime must have actually taken place, just because it is alleged to have taken place, is of course one that could only be implemented in a totalitarian society. (It was, in fact, implemented in the Jim Crow South -- a fascist society avant la lettre, as Claude McKay pointed out -- for the purposes of racial terrorism.) The idea that any allegation of a crime must be regarded as prima facie true could please only a lynch mob.
Most people, I think, recognize this on some level -- they realize that this is an extremely difficult position to defend, especially for a contemporary political Left that claims to also stand on the side of the rights of prisoners and against mass incarceration and over-policing. So, it cannot be examined too closely. It becomes a dogma. It must be taken on faith.
More often that actually defending a preposterous belief, however, the Left is guilty of simply implying that belief and retreating into vagueness when pressed on the point. So many times after Charlottesville I have heard people say something like: "Hate speech isn't free speech." But what does that mean? Should hate speech be outlawed? Should there be criminal penalties involved? If so, how steep should they be? How long should people who engage in hate speech be put in prison? (At this point, one often remembers that one's far-left interlocutors are also self-proclaimed prison abolitionists, and one realizes why they felt obliged to make a retreat into vagueness).
Or sometimes, as with the Love placards, the Left simply fails to have a goal at all, other than saying that we should get rid of some mammoth and all-ecompassing abstraction -- like liberalism, capitalism, consumerism, modernity.
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Fair enough. But then, it must seem rather presumptuous to favor Mamet's alternative -- i.e., the policy of figuring out what to do about a problem, and then doing it. After all, aren't there social problems so difficult and complex that they defy this kind of swift and programmatic response? And aren't there truths that are too recondite to be conveyed to the flawed and limited human mind, or to be grasped in the course of a single car ride, but that exist nonetheless?
Yes, and yes. No argument there. The reason to insist upon only pursuing goals that can be articulated is not because these are the only valid goals that might exist in the universe. It is because we have no other choice. We can't act upon any other sort of goal. We cannot pursue that which no one can define.
Likewise, the reason not to take any claims on faith is not because of the purity and perfection of one's own motives or conceptual apparatus. It is because we have nothing else to go on. Anytime anyone tells you that they are in possession of an ineffable truth -- the "economic argument against same-sex marriage," let's say -- it is of course possible that in fact they are, and you are just not capable of understanding it. It is also possible, however, that they are trying to sneak a lot of vague thinking and flim-flam past you by calling it ineffable. How are you ever going to tell the difference if you are incapable of fitting any of it into your conceptual apparatus either way?
It is of course possible that there are a whole host of metaphysical realities that lie beyond what human minds are able to conceive. But any news of them can only come to us through our own minds, or through the words of some equally imperfect mortal vessel. And thus, we will still have the task ahead of us of sorting out which mortal vessels to believe.
There is no escape, then, from the responsibility of thinking and discerning. This is the sum and substance of what UU theological James Luther Adams was trying to tell the world, at the totalitarian mid-point of the last-century. Even if you "have faith" in a particular authority or source of revelation, you still had to make a choice at some point that this was the right authority or source in which to invest that faith. There is no question in human life of simply not choosing. There is no escape from freedom. There are only better and worse reasons for making one choice over another.
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At a job one time, we participated in an anti-racism training. We were asked to read a short pamphlet about the experiences of a non-profit based in New England that had undergone what is described as an anti-racist organizational transformation over a period of many years. The pamphlet had been written, of course, under the aegis of the organization's current management. The account it has to offer is described as a success story, but along the way, it is clear, the organization faced many challenges in implementing its new program, including a union dispute with its employees (management being allegedly on the side of anti-racism, and the union resisting the changes it was trying to introduce).
The pamphlet had many points that made me squirm with their pointed accuracy. It talked about how many little strategies and devices white employees will use to become defensive and resistant, to shift the conversation, to talk about anything other than the painful topic of racism and complicity. It talked about how so often the questioning of the methods of the anti-racism program and the attempt to lift individual cases of injustices against white employees to parity with the structural injustice of racism are simply defensive mechanisms to avoid talking about the real issue.
This is all profoundly plausible. It made me turn green with recognition of my own inward strategies of cowardice and psychic misdirection.
I am every bit as flawed and mortal as this assessment made us out to be. The problem with the pamphlet's implied position, however, is that so, presumably, is the management of the organization. So presumably, are the authors of the pamphlet. How are we to know that management was right, and the union was wrong, if we cannot question the methods? How are we to know that the union's grievances were grounded in racism, if we have to take management's account of events as a given? Why should we trust management's anti-racism program to be effective and meritorious, if it cannot be defended with any arguments other than an ad hominem about the motivations of its opponents?
The reason we should not take things on faith is not because we are such pristine souls ourselves. It is not because we are so wise, so smart, so non-racist, that we are incapable of error. It is because all the people around us have the same flaws and limitations we do. The critique that rationalism seeks to "exalt reason," to elevate it into an object of worship, is misplaced. I, for one, do not think my reasoning powers amount to much, in the face of human society and the universe. But I don't know of anyone else's who do either. Unless we are to believe that there is a privileged caste of humanity -- one that was elected from the beginning to possess secret insights -- we have no better option than to rely on our own faulty efforts to sort our what is fair and unfair, just and unjust, truthful and false.
The loneliness of this fact of human life can be overwhelming. But to invest "faith" in an external source of truth -- a hierarchy, an ideology, a political party -- is not truly to escape it. One has still made one's choice. One is simply now at the added disadvantage of being unable to articulate one's reasons for doing so. One cannot therefore be surprised if others prefer not to follow you.
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