The 4 Great Enemies of Democracy

The late scholar Cleanth Brooks of Yale thought there
were three great enemies of democracy.

He called them "The Bastard Muses":

1-Propaganda: which pleads sometimes unscrupulously,
for a special cause at the expense of the total truth.

2-Sentimentality: which works up emotional responses
unwarranted by, and in excess of, the occasion.

3-Pornography: which focuses upon one powerful human
drive at the expense of the total human personality.

The poet Czeslaw Milosz identified the fourth enemy of
democracy when, upon accepting the Noble Prize for
Literature, he said "Our planet that gets smaller
every year, with its fantastic proliferation of mass
media, is witnessing a process that escapes definition,
characterized by a refusal to remember."

4-Memory: which is crucial to democracy;
historical amnesia, its nemesis.