A quote from "The Audacity of Hope" by Barak Obama
I'd begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy.... In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversation when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into cant: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism cam too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embrace as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized.
I know too many people who repeat what they've heard without adding any knowledge of their own. What's worse, is that their sources are limited to a single stream, so there is little chance of a new idea developing. I'm sure I'm guilty of it myself from time to time. Too often now, a statement is critiqued not so much for content, as it is for who has created it. A singer who agrees with you is now considered a better source of information than a scholar who does not.
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