Maistre laughed at the claims that human beings are rational.
Look, he said, at how the public treats the public executioner and the soldier.
In those days, every city had a hangman. But that fellow was widely ostracized. People wouldn’t talk to him. They would snub his family.
The soldier home from the wars, on the other hand, was treated like a hero.
The difference, Maistre said, was that the executioner killed bad men, while the soldier killed honorable men who were fighting for their country and innocent civilians.
Men don’t live by reason, at least in Maistre’s telling.
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