Word: hegelianism
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...choice. One night a week, usually Wednesday, he leads a campaign meeting at the residence that includes the President, Vice President, Sosnik, Bob Squier (the campaign media adviser brought in by Morris and Gore), Stephanopoulos and other senior aides. Ickes apparently bridles at Morris' highbrow musing about the Hegelian dialectics of campaigns...
What is missing is the synthesis, or "sinthesis" as I prefer to call it. The formula is exactly Hegelian. You do your thesis. It drives you crazy, so you avoid it with anti-thesis. Together thesis and anti-thesis explode in a giant ball of fire that, if you're lucky, leaves you with sin-thesis...
Part of the fallacy then, which Fukuyama perpetuates, was an obsessive focus on ideology. Of course ideas can be wonderful, or terrible, and potent; you don't have to be a Hegelian to know that. But Fukuyama invests abstractions -- comprehensive categories and grand postulations -- with more weight than messy reality will support. For instance, in a chart intended to show how the number of "liberal democracies" on earth has grown, he includes Singapore, where there are laws against chewing gum and failing to flush public toilets; Sri Lanka, where murderous ethnic and religious violence continues nonstop; and Colombia, where narcoterrorists...
...doesn't need to understand or believe in Hegelian epistemology to recognize the syndromes Understanding Toscanini analyzes. Many decades have passed since "classical" music, whatever that is, was a living, breathing art, unencumbered by its own prestige and the status-seeking of audiences...
...sense to assume that any trend will keep on advancing until it triumphs all along the line. A trend postulates a countertrend, a force to be overcome, and if that latter has any raison d'etre to begin with, it will eventually reassert itself, and turn things around. The Hegelian triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis has much to recommend it as a scheme of change...