So hard to bear, the ugly road

It is so hard to go against the established. In a double sense. It is not only that you need to have the strength to defend your position every day on and on but also, first, you must find evidence of your claim and prove it to you as to be satisfied. And that is to me real hard. Any traces of a different way of thinking are normally obliterated and if not, the path is so hard to walk. Too much lonely and hesitating.

It is thus impressive to find characters who did follow the ugly road.

The account of Rousseau that Paul Johnson offers in Intellectuals is devastating, just so hard to bear. Why is it possible that such a clear portrait has not been showed before? Why is it ignored now?

The opening epigraph of Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies is as much impressive:

PERICLES OF ATHENS (about 430 B.C.): "Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it".

PLATO OF ATHENS (about 80 years later): "The greatest principle of all is that nobody, whether male or female, should be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative; neither our zeal, nor even playfully. But in war and and in the midst of peace -to his leader he shall direct his eye and follow him faithfully. And even in the smaller matter he should stand under leadership. For example, he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals... Only if he has been told to do so. In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it.

Here there are two clear, modern-fashion statements. Why was I showed both authors as old fools, with no connection whatsoever with the real life? Pure moldy philosophic crap? Dark and dead, motionless and rotten knowledge?

It has to be one to walk the ugly road and to blow the fairy dust upon the corpse of official knowledge, so something came to life and start making some sense.

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