If you accept, as I think you should, that there are mental tricks to stop you from caring about other people and that there are people to which these things are like an anesthesia, it’s easy to see why the leaders of those people tend to be our worst.

The art of giving nothing to us except a vast range of excuses and permission slips to care less has been mastered in our age.

Yet since voting for one person or another appears to have little effect on our own life, voting for the permission slips is not a completely irrational alternative.