Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.” Jacob Bronowski in Science and Human Values - Jacob Bronowski

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

But it is of critical importance to ask ourselves what features which other animals do not possess have given human beings the very special capacities with which we are concerned in these lectures: the ability to utter cognitive sentences (which no other animal can do) and the ability therefore to exercise knowledge and imagination.

I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into–into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions … into extrasensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself.

Unhappily, common sense has no recorded history.