The ideas expressed in Creative Experience continueto have an impact. Follett’s process of integration, for example, forms the basisof what is now commonly referred to as a ‘‘win-win’’ approach to conflictresolution; and her distinction between ‘‘power-with’’ and ‘‘power-over’’ hasbeen used by so many distinguished thinkers that it has become a part of ourpopular vocabulary. ≤

Instead, we focus on the relationship between the human mind and the mechanics underlying allsocial systems. The search for the locus where the distribution of governing powers can be shiftedhas brought us thus to the human mind itself. Only by affirming the human as different from thesocial persona it enacts can we see the golden thread along which the human takeover can and musthappen. This golden thread runs in the usually unperceived gaps between thoughts, communicationsand decisions that are preconditioned, preprogramed, prethought [5 ,43 ,44 ]. It brings to the light ofconsciousness the thinking, speaking and acting that are present and living. ‘What I propose, therefore,is very simple’—Hannah Arendt [ 45 ] wrote—‘it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.’To think, to voice, to enact each time anew, is the vehicle of the human takeover. To secure the continuityof this golden thread, of this very flow into the governance of society—is our existential challenge.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

The Banality of Evil

Literally everyone is just following orders from the machine.

pour garantir la possibilité de la pluralité des points de vue

The remedy which the tradition of Western thought has proposed for the unpredictability and irreversibility of action has consisted in abstaining from action altogether, in the withdrawal from the sphere of interaction with others, in the hope that one’s freedom and integrity could thereby be preserved. Platonism, Stoicism and Christianity elevated the sphere of contemplation above the sphere of action, precisely because in the former one could be free from the entanglements and frustrations of action. Arendt’s proposal, by contrast, is not to turn one’s back on the realm of human affairs, but to rely on two faculties inherent in action itself, the faculty of forgiving and the faculty of promising. These two faculties are closely connected, the former mitigating the irreversibility of action by absolving the actor from the unintended consequences of his or her deeds, the latter moderating the uncertainty of its outcome by binding actors to certain courses of action and thereby setting some limit to the unpredictability of the future. Both faculties are, in this respect, connected to temporality: from the standpoint of the present forgiving looks backward to what has happened and absolves the actor from what was unintentionally done, while promising looks forward as it seeks to establish islands of security in an otherwise uncertain and unpredictable future.

Enrollment was small, around twenty, but a number of future intellectual luminaries, like Hannah Arendt and Jacques Lacan, either took the class or sat in on it.

they will willingly work harder and harder to buy more “labor-saving devices,” instead of using their potential liberation from labor to embrace (non-productive) political action and freedom.  The moderns have lost their taste for, even any understanding of, “freedom,” and are addicted to “necessities”—ever more elaborate meals, houses, clothes etc.