“The modern moralists extol … the cult of practical activity in defiance of the disinterested life.”

— Julien Benda

Source: Treason of the Intellectuals (1927), p. 146

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Julien Benda 19

French essayist 1867–1956

Wilhelm Stekel (1868–1940) Austrian physician and psychologist

Sadism and Masochism : The Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty, Vol. 1 (1939), p. 46
Context: An intense, unyielding stubbornness hides beneath an apparent obedience (the patient brings a vast number of dreams; his associations become endless; he produces an inexhaustible number of recollections, which seem to him very important but are actually of little moment; or he goes off upon some byroad suggested by the analyst and leads the latter into a blind alley).
The child manifests the same reactions of defiance and obedience. The child, too, can hide his stubbornness behind an excessive docility (the parent's command: You must be industrious. Industry may become a mania so that the child neither goes out nor has time to sleep). Obedience is the giving up of the resistance; obstinacy the setting up of fresh resistances. This resistance is externally active. We have in recent years had sufficient opportunity to observe the law of resistance (the passive resistance). Activity and defiance show great differences. Defiance is the reaction against activity (aggression) of the environment. It may then manifest itself actively or passively and stands in the service of the defensive tendency of the ego. Every resistance reveals the ego (one's own) in conflict with another.

“Formerly, leaders of states practiced realism, but did not honor it… With them morality was violated, but moral notions remained intact. … The modern governor, owing to the fact that he addresses crowds, is compelled to be a moralist, and to present his acts as bound up with a system of morality.”

Julien Benda (1867–1956) French essayist

Source: Treason of the Intellectuals (1927), pp. 110-111

“Rabbi Maurice Davis -- Senior rabbi of the Jewish Community Center of White Plains, N. Y.; faculty member of Manhattan College; actively engaged in combating cults for over five years; responsible for separating 128 young people from cults.”

Maurice Davis (1921–1993) American rabbi

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF PARTICIPANTS – INFORMATION MEETING ON THE CULT PHENOMENON IN THE UNITED STATES http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Cult_Phenomenon_in_the_United_States_%281979%29/Biographical_Sketches, February 5, 1979, 318 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. [Between pages 18-19 of Transcript of Proceedings]. The Cult Phenomenon in the United States (1979), Joint-Congressional Proceedings, Chaired by Senator Bob Dole
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“Libertarianism is rejected by the modern left — which preaches individualism but practices collectivism. Capitalism is rejected by the modern right-which preaches enterprise but practices protectionism.”

Karl Hess (1923–1994) American journalist

“The Death of Politics”, Playboy (March, 1969).

“Where speculation ends — in real life — there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take place.”

Karl Marx book The German Ideology

Vol. I, Part 1, [The Materialist Conception of History].
The German Ideology (1845/46)
Context: Where speculation ends — in real life — there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement — the real depiction — of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the present.