What happens to human reason under duress?

IMO, reason is the one quality that differentiates civilized people from savages. The problem is, at our stage of evolution, civilization is a very very thin veneer. It does not take much to strip that veneer away. Reason departs, and people become brutes.

So many people react emotionally, without thinking things through. Why do you think that there still is such a surfeit of terror, agression, and irrationality amongst human beings today?

What is rational to one person has little to do with what is rational to the next. "Rational" is based in what the person believes and the knowledge/experience the person holds. People only come to the same "rational conclusions" if they have a common base of knowledge and experience.

An when yer the Sun King, rational is whatever the hell you say it is . . .

Hence "It is good to be the king!" ????

Aye . . . 'tis . . .

dov, what the woman in Iraq called "journalism," we would call "public relations." Perhaps in Iraq, there is no distinction...?

We all have our own "rational" standards. Without laws, humans would be living in chaos. c.i.

He may not always be right -- but he is always the King -- and that is damn near the same as always being right.

The best biography of Louis XIV, in my never humble opinion, is that of Hillaire Belloc, written in the 1930's. The memoires of St. Simon have the best dirt on the royal entourage.

Louis was born in 1638. In 1643, the old king died, and Louis became King at age 5, with his mother, Anne of Austria, one of history's great, courageous, very capable and predictably unknown female leaders, directed the kingdom with the aid of the policies of Richelieu (who had died the year before) and his successor, Mazarin. Two weeks after the death of Louis XIII, the French military hero, Condé, defeated the Spanish at Rocroi, and effectively ended any serious threat from the Spanish in the low countries. The Thirty years war had wound down to the point that it simply awaited diplomacy to settle the "Swedish question," to put that war to rest. This meant that the other French military great man of the age, Tourenne, was freed to return to France. Typically, the French kingdom degenerated into the civil war, the Wars of the Fronde (the fronde is a sling, the preferred weapon of peasants in the south who followed the banner of "overmighty" lords attempting to put Anne of Austria out of business). Both Condé and Tourenne took the side first of the royal government and then of the rebels, taking it in turn to either defend or attack Paris. Louis drifted along, first in a world of fear and uncertainty as a small boy, and, after the end of the Fronde, as a sybaritic and insouciant youth who wanted nothing but hedonistic novelty--being King, he, of course, got what he wanted. At age 23, he decided to dispense with Mazarin, who annoyed him, and to take the reins of government into his own hands. I know of no other monarch in European history who was even remotely as much the master of his own fate and the complete and accepted ruler of his own nation, with the exception of Gustav II Adolph of Sweden. Louis is one of the most remarkable figures in history, and, as such, is better known through legendary crap than a genuine historical understanding.

I was reading a memoir of M. Montespan, the mistress of Louis XIV and the mother of three of his children. There is a unique type of inside knowledge to be had from the opinions of those that were actually involved in something. There is a greater degree of prejudice and inaccuracy but nevertheless a rare glimpse. According to her, Louis XIV was the bee's knee's.