The Secret Knowledge (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

Write a ridiculously simplified synopsis.

Quotes edit see section history

• “All religions stem from the same universal needs. ... The political impulse, similarly, must, however manifested, proceed from a universal urge to order social relations.”

• “Most Victorian novels featured the stock character of the profligate son. He was a gambler, and, having run through his inheritance, was constantly appealing to his father to pay his ever renewed gambling debts. … Our politicians, left and right, are, to belabor the metaphor, the wastrel son: they are free to spend, to chase fantasies, to squander resources, for the resources are not theirs, and there is no penalty for their misuse or loss.”

• “<Chicago> then was not the promise of snow removal and an absence of litter, but an amalgam of strivers and hucksters, and I found it thus, either much like myself, or, more likely, I became schooled by its culture, just like the Mayors Daley and then-State Senator Obama and all the governors and councilmen who went to jail, and Hugh Hefner, building whorehouses which sold everything but sex, and the inspired and depraved of that toddling town.”

• “I dated a wonderful girl who worked for the Mob. She lived in the Belden Stratford Hotel, and in the summer she would sunbathe in the park across from the hotel, by the statue of Shakespeare, and every hour a bellman would bring her an iced coffee. She drove a Mercedes 280 convertible, and she never locked the car, as, she explained, anyone who wanted to break in would simply slit the roof, so why antagonize them? The back of the car was ankle deep in parking tickets. She would park on the steps of City Hall. And when the tickets got too deep, she’d collect them in a bag, and give them to somebody who would fix them. … Her boyfriend followed us now and then, in his car. She told me he had vowed to kill me, but I’d seen him, and I didn’t believe the threat. I don’t think this was particularly courageous on my part; he just didn’t look the type.”

• “Each party alleges, and its enthusiasts agree, that it has never done anything wrong, and its opponent has never done anything right. Any failures, catastrophes, or absurdities during its tenure are blamed on late-appearing aftereffects of its predecessor’s enormities.”

• “...<W>e are in the process of choosing, as a society, between Liberty--the freedom from the State to pursue happiness<-->and a supposed but impossible Equality, which, as it could only be brought about by a State capable and empowered to function in all facets of life, means totalitarianism and eventual dictatorship.”

• “Once, in my younger days, I was asked to help out at a fundraising event ....to alleviate hunger. ...<T>he tickets were numbered one, two, and three. Those getting number one were entitled to all they could eat.; the twos, to a meal consisting of five hundred calories...; the threes got nothing at all.... I collected the money from a fellow there with his young son. He leaned in toward me and asked me to give them both a three. ...If the fellow wanted his son to know what it felt like to miss a meal, couldn't he have played that charade at home? ...But this fellow was practicing Pediatric Socialism: he, rightly, as a loving father, never wanted his son to be hungry; but, like a loving but over indulgent father, he wanted to purchase for him an approximation of the experience, which, he thought, might make his son a better person. ....<M>ore likely, the son had observed that money and influence could buy anything, even a charade of poverty.”

• “Someone, and it may have been William Styron, said that a drinking problem is like a little Latin--sooner or later, it will find its way into your writing.”

• “Most legislation aimed at eliminating unhappiness and discontent has resulted in misery.”

• “Our American plane has been forced to land at some foreign airport, by the outbreak of World War III. It will not be able to depart. Two planes are leaving the airport; we must choose which we want to board. One plane is flying to Israel and one to Syria, and we must choose. That's where sympathy stops. No noe reading this book would get on the plane to Syria. Why? It is a despotism, opposed to the West, to women, to gays, to Jews, to free speech. It is a heinous Arab version of National Socialism, dedicated to the murder of every person in Israel. And yet one may gain status or a feeling of solidarity by embracing the "Arab cause." But we embrace it only as an entertainment. In the free market, which is to say, when something is at stake, we will vote otherwise.”

• “Do bumper stickers save whales, and free Tibet? By what magical process?”

• “This is the state of the contemporary Liberal world--the fear of giving offense has been self-inculcated in a group which must, now, consider literally every word and action, for potential violation of the New Norms. To further compound the dilemma, the norms themselves are inchoate: consider the high school teacher coming upon two students kissing in the hallway, in violation of school rules. Suppose the two students are gay. Can you imagine a teacher who would not at the very least hesitate in or mitigate her caution or censure in fear of offending the students?”

• “From the Webbs, and Betrand Russell, to Susan Sonrag, Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and various movie stars of our day, these happy dupes reward themselves for feeling superior to their own country, from which country they were free to travel, and to which they were free to return, while the smiling folk they visited were locked in slave states. ...This "visiting" and political pilgrimage differs from safari in that one does not here toy with danger. It more closely resembles the Victorian practice of "going among the poor."”

• “<T>hese disaffected are taken, in my business, in the main, from the ranks of actors and writers, and interestingly, contain only a very small number of directors. Why? A director cannot deal in fantasy. His job is to take the delineation of a fantasy (a script) and turn it into film-in-the-can. He has a certain amount of time and money with which to do so, and no amount of fantasy will stop the sun going down on a day on which he has not completed his assigned filming.”

• “Our beautiful American language is now subject to revision by those screaming loudest, and we have the enormity of s/he, the clunky continuous reiteration of his-or-her, and so on. This revision is presented by the Left as an aid of equality, but its result is an atmosphere not of happy compliance, but of anxiety, circumlocution, and a formalism destructive of the free exchange of ideas.”

• “A friend reports that she saw a doyenne of the Left at a restaurant and asked her advice on some question of Liberal Doctrine. "Contact MoveOn.org," the doyenne replied, "and do whatever they say."”

• “The struggle of the Left to rationalize its positions is an intolerable, Sisyphean burden. I speak as a reformed Liberal.”

• “I was teaching a seminar on dramatic structure at a university. ... A young ideologue broadened his thesis, it was not only the responsibility of the dramatist, he taught, to refrain from stereotyping, but to use every aspect fo the drama to enforce upon the public a humanitarian view of the world. Homosexuals, for instance, he said, should be seen kissing onstage whenever possible, was it not an outrage that the part of Blanche in "A Streetcar Named Desire" was always played by a woman? Why could it not be played by a man? "Well," I said, "it could be played by a man. 'Steetcar' is essentially a gay fantasy written by a gay writer, and clothed in straight terms." This gave the young fellow pause, for he was not sure if my comment supported or opposed his thesis.”

• “How wonderful to think of ourselves as heroes, and how often is such a fantasy the result of a feeling of powerlessness. The Left offers the ever-attractive suggestion that one, knowing himself to be (like you and me) a biddable, often confused, flawed human being, may rise above his knowledge by merely announcing his capacity for Herohood.”

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• The great wickedness of Liberalism, I saw, was that those who devise the ever new State Utopias, whether crooks or fools, set out to bankrupt and restrict not themselves, but others.3

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• The grave error of multiculturalism is the assumption that reason can modify a process which has taken place without reason, and with inputs astronomically greater than those reason might provide.

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• Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions.

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• To fix the game for money is called corruption, to fix the game from sentiment is called Liberalism.

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• We cannot live without trade. A society can neither advance nor improve without excess of disposable income. This excess can only be amassed through the production of goods and services necessary or attractive to the mass. A financial system which allows this leads to inequality; one that does not leads to mass starvation.

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• It is not the absence of government, but the rejection of culture which leads to anarchy.

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• Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost. Central to this religion is the assertion that evil does not exist, all conflict being attributed to a lack of understanding between the opposed.

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• My revelation came upon reading Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. It was that there is a cost to everything, that nothing is without cost, and that energy spent on A cannot be spent on B, and that this is the meaning of cost—it represents the renunciation of other employments of the money. He wrote that there are no solutions; there are only tradeoffs—money spent on more crossing guards cannot be spent on books. Both are necessary, a choice must be made, and that this is the Tragic view of life.

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• The Good Causes of the Left may generally be compared to NASCAR; they offer the diversion of watching things go excitingly around in a circle, getting nowhere.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Palestine
• Israel
• Chicago
• Selma, Alabama: Site of a famous Civil Rights march in the 1960s.
• Central Valley of California: The flow of water to farmers there was stopped to protect an endangered species of fish.

First Sentence edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. David Mamet (Author)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 320.5130973

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences