Human nobility expressed in the virtue of the citizen

“Although many might be willing to admit that one’s duties toward one’s own take precedence over those toward mankind at large, it might well be asked why it is necessary to harm enemies, or why there need be enemies at all. The answer is twofold. There are unjust men who would destroy the good things and the good life of one’s own family or nation if one did not render them impotent. And, even though there were not men who are natively unjust, there is a scarcity of good things in the world. The good life of one group of men leaves other groups outside who would like, and may even be compelled, to take away the good things of the first group. To have a family or a city that is one’s own implies the distinction between insiders and outsiders; and the outsiders are potential enemies. Justice as helping friends and harming enemies is peculiarly a political definition of justice, and its dignity stands or falls with the dignity of political life. Every nation has wars and must defend itself, it can only do so if it has citizens who care for it and are willing to kill the citizens of other nations. If the distinction between friends and enemies, and the inclination to help the former and harm the latter, were obliterated from the heart and mind of man, political life would be impossible. This is the necessary political definition of justice, and it produces its specific kind of human nobility expressed in the virtue of the citizen.”

— Allan Bloom in his "Interpretive Essay" on Plato's Republic (1968)

See also: The Concept of the Political by Carl Schmitt (1933).

Three unmet conditions

“If most people did indeed want peace, plenty, and freedom from all forms of exploitation and tyranny; and if (what is just as necessary, though less often remarked) they also knew the means whereby these were to be got; and if they were willing and courageous and strong and intelligent and self sacrificing enough to bring about those means to those ends; then no doubt the world would achieve a society organized in such a way as to realize peace, plenty, and freedom. But there is not any evidence at all from past or present history that all three (and all three would be required) of these conditions will be met. On the contrary, the evidence of the analogies from the past and the circumstances of the present is that people will act and wish and hope and decide in ways that will aid in the managerial revolution, in the carrying through of the social transition which will end in the consolidation of managerial society.”

— James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution (1941)

So Deeply Embedded in Our History and Our Habitual Ways, or, “This Is Water”

“Locke’s real starting-point was not a theoretical mass of right-possessing individuals in a state of nature, but his own countrymen under the English constitution of his own day. The state of nature and its whole concomitant apparatus of natural rights and the social contract was the regular stock in-trade of the political writers of his age. He adopted all this because he could hardly help doing so, and because it was what the readers of political treatises expected and accepted. But what he was really doing, under the guise of erecting a form of government on the basis of freely consenting individuals, was to describe the operation of the traditional English constitution in terms of the political philosophy current in his age. The notion of consent, never strictly analysed, and involving some element of legal fiction, had come to be embodied in this constitution in the course of its historical development, and was already so well established (particularly with respect to taxation and legislation) by the time Locke inherited it that he (and no doubt his readers also) found no need to subject it to a close analysis and scrutiny. Under such a scrutiny, I think we must conclude, the notion may seem self-contradictory, and it might therefore be wiser for us to abandon it. Yet it is so deeply embedded in our history and our habitual ways of speech and thought that perhaps this is scarcely possible.”

— J. W. Gough in John Locke's Political Philosophy (1950)

“This is Water” is the title of David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to the Kenyon College graduating class of 2005.

Of all human efforts the most liable to shipwreck

“To all efforts of men to cooperate, fate has attached a penalty. Whenever a common interest exists, an antagonism of interest springs out of it.

If forces are joined for a hunt, division of the bag must follow, and neither an equal division nor an unequal division will satisfy everybody. If they are joined for battle, the brunt must fall on some and not on others. If two till a field together, each becomes concerned that the other does not shirk or consume undue share of the yield. Labor needs capital, and capital can do nothing without labor, in the welfare of their common business their interests are identical. Yet the net income must be somehow divided, and, in this cooperation, what is more for the one is less for the other: at the point of distribution the appearance of harmony vanishes. No one whose mind refuses to face both the agreement and the divergence of these interests can be more than a blind guide for the present age.

Beside the discords of apportionment, there are the discords of dissent in the conduct of the common enterprise. For the most part, human beings are gifted in the capacity for falling in behind leadership; but it is a rare group in which there is no superfluity of planning intelligence, or the conceit of it. Hence human groups move habitually under the friction of divergent counsels. It is physically easier for men to live together than to live apart. It is morally easier for them to live apart than to maintain permanently a successful partnership or friendship.

Hence the word ‘cooperation,’ amiable of sound, flourished by many a reformer as the key to social problems, solves nothing. Every new cooperation or stage in cooperation is the beginning of new difficulty. Deliberate cooperation is of all human efforts the most liable to shipwreck. Experimental communities, socialistic or other, whose presumptive advantage is gained by increasing the existing burden of cooperation, must find a way of arbitrary relief from the added strain in enhanced authority, or else in heightened religion a way of replenishing their energy toward harmony: otherwise they must perish, as most such experiments have perished.

In sum, we may say that there is in the nature of human associations a law of decline–of decline, that is, in their energy of union, which subtly ushers every such enterprise toward death.”

— William Ernest Hocking in Man and State (1926)

It's nothing personal

“The enemy is anyone who questions liberalism, globalism, individualism, nominalism in all their manifestations. This is the new ethic of liberalism. It’s nothing personal. Everyone has the right to be liberal, but no one has the right to be anything else.”

— Aleksandr Dugin in The Great Awakening vs. the Great Reset (2021)