Edward R. Murrow reporting a first-hand account of what he witnessed inside Buchenwald following its liberation.
Permit me to tell you what you would have seen and heard had you been with me on Thursday. It will not be pleasant listening. If you are at lunch, or if you have no appetite to hear what Germans have done, now is a good time to switch off the radio.Originally broadcast on April 15, 1945.
Hi, college students!
Fraternities and sororities are a cultural manifestation of the inability of members of mass society to escape the herd mentality and live & act as singular individuals whose goals and desires are entirely their own. They exist because there exist in this world multitudes of persons who desire nothing more than to have somebody else decide how they should live their life and why it ought to be lived that way, and worse yet there exist persons who crave to do exactly that, and regularly abuse the power of influence which they achieve over their weaker-minded compatriots.
How do you feel about me divulging this fact?
It speaks for itself.
The government only fears an rational, logical, intelligent, informed and armed public. We can be the smartest people ever to walk this earth but unless we can resist force with force the government will never fear us!
He who has the guns makes the rules.
On Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism
Jean-Paul Sartre’s statement that human beings are “condemned to be free,” and his development of the concept of bad faith are philosophical notions tied to his understanding of the capacity of humans to choose. That we are condemned to be free arises from an innate ability to make decisions. Bad faith is the concession that even though they are able to choose it is common for persons to convince themselves that they have no choices, thereby leading them to act as external pressures dictate over their own desires.
The idea of being condemned to be free, in Sartre’s mind, comes from the fact that humans are responsible for the choices they make in life; it is up to each individual to mold his identity over his lifetime. However, despite this lifetime of choices, no person ever chose to become free. Freedom is merely an integral part of the human condition and once brought into this world by forces not chosen by the individual, man must live constrained only by man’s own choices thenceforth. Sartre says that “man is responsible for his passions.” That is to say that if man’s passions arise from his nature, then man’s nature arises from man’s choices in life. He shows that no external forces can allow an individual to escape the responsibility of making those choices on his own. In discussing the common practice of enlisting the advice of others in making a decision, it is explained that even then the person seeking advice must choose to whom he will go for that advice. By making this choice, the individual has already chosen what advice he will get, and only the individual himself knows how he will react to that advice.
This understanding seems fairly straightforward except for one respect; a question is raised regarding those situations all of us know when we feel as though we truly have no choice in our next course of action. What of them? Well, Sartre responds to this with the concept of acting in bad faith. This is a phenomenon where a person feels that they have no choice in action and so act out of accordance with what they desire. Sartre believes that this phenomenon is the result of people feeling social pressures to act without authenticity, and follow prescribed courses of action. But he says that even though pressures have encouraged them to act this way, it is still the person who has chosen to succumb to those pressures as opposed to ignoring them and acting as he would in a vacuum, so to speak.
These concepts, being derived from Sartre’s initial position that for humanity existence precedes essence, are used to explain his belief in human freedom. To Sartre, humanity is responsible for its freedom; we are to be held accountable for our actions because we have no choice but to choose. There is no shield to hide from the consequences of our decisions, there is no way for us to avoid acting for even inaction is a choice not to act and the consequences therein are ours alone to shoulder.
