Russell Muirhead

“ Work does not “give” dignity to our lives through the excellence or happiness it fosters. The dignity of work comes less from its ideal promise than from the way we show, through it, a determination to endure what is difficult for the sake of discharging our responsibilities and contributing to society. It is less the source of our happiness than the illustration that we deserve happiness. Through work we reveal our tough minded commitment in the face of conditions that cannot bend exactly to our will. When this commitment brings a partial triumph over an unaccommodating world, work illuminates something of the dignity that resides in us independent of the character of our work. It expresses a kind of defiance, for we willfully ignore the ultimate resistance of a world we yet try to shape. Thus work reveals, though it cannot produce, the dignity of those who take their condition to be at least partly of their own making.”
― Russell Muirhead, Just Work

“When we decide what community is worthy of epistemic trust, we are implicitly also deciding what it means to know something. Reflecting on Donald Trump’s historical mishmash of a statement that Andrew Jackson was angry about the Civil War (which began sixteen years after Jackson’s death), George Will dissected the president’s words to underscore the essential character of his thought. It is not that Trump suffers the disability of an untrained mind tied to “stratospheric self-confidence,” Will wrote, or that he is intellectually slothful and misinformed or totally ignorant of ordinary matters of history and of the fact that he has no knowledge of that about which he speaks, or that he is indifferent to being bereft of information. It is not that he is cognitively impaired. “The problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.” This is dangerous in a president, Will observes, for it “leaves him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.”1 And when that mind demands that its reality be accepted as how things are, we are embattled by an assault on our sense of what it means to know something.”
― Russell Muirhead, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy