“As indicated, there has emerged a phenomenon unknown to antiquity that permeates our modern societies so completely that its ubiquity scarcely leaves us any room to see it at all: the prohibition of questioning. This is not a matter of resistance to analysis – that existed in antiquity as well. It does not involve those who cling to opinions by reason of tradition or emotion, or those who engage in debate in a naive confidence in the rightness of their opinions and who take the offensive only when analysis unnerves them. Rather, we are confronted here with persons who know that, and why, their opinions cannot stand up under critical analysis and who therefore make a prohibition of the examination of their premises part of their dogma. this position of a conscious, deliberate, and painstakingly elaborated obstruction of ratio constitutes the new phenomenon.”

▪ Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Regnery, 1968) extract from pages 14 through to 15.

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