How would they ever learn enough to blame us? The natural target for the people's resentment will be the government--the Emperor's advisers. They will never look beyond that.

People believe in supernatural influences.~ They always have.

It is possible that some among us have interpreted some relationships to indicate that the junta may be an unstable form of government, but there are other relationships that may easily be interpreted to show it is stable.

Taxation loses effectiveness at both extremes. Overcomplicate it and people cannot understand it and pay for an overgrown and expensive tax organization. Oversimplify it and people consider it unfair and grow bitterly resentful. The simplest is a poll tax, in which every individual pays the same amount, but the unfairness of treating rich and poor alike in this way is too evident to overlook.

People tended to avoid the humiliation of failure by joining the obviously winning side even against their own opinions.

In my life there have been several individuals whose presence made it easier for me to think, pleasanter to make my responses.

Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading.