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Almost no one I know should agree with these observations. These Notes.

How few lives are not lived according to social expectations.

One had to have had a rather wide and deep disinterest, or thoughtlessness, to have been so buoyantly optimistic in the suburbs of the USA in the 1950s.

A history of the fact and effect of naïveté about human nature in and on History.

If one recognizes, then accepts, then realizes, that virtually all one will ever meet are at most in a kind of waking dream, it potentially deeply changes one’s relationship to society – and perhaps also socializing.

– a reflection revived on reading The Ministry of Truth the Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 by Dorian Lynskey

Character seems impossible now in the US Senate.

Those who have observed, thought, traveled, studied, experienced enough to recognize that the various “nationalities” in the world are historic group identities, which imagines to adequately comprehend and contain human nature.

Having been not much more troubled by “human nature” then imagining ourselves to have read The Naked Ape in our final high school year (1971), likely few if any of my graduating class ever came to need or want to imagine that the obvious evils in and of eg Nazi Germany or its concentration or death camps or the Soviet Union’s communism and Gulag , were also (readily?) potent in our unreflective and unreflected nature.

In the knowledge of the greater scale of human nature evidenced (and experienced) in and as good and evil in History, that of most middle classes is middling.

It would likely be too dismaying and depressing for most humans to have a deeper, realistic knowledge of human nature.