Benjamins View on things

The quote that stuck out to me the most was on page 256 of Illuminations (41 of the course packet) it stated “Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate”. The first thing I thought of Economy and Society by Weber when he talks about who qualifies as a charismatic leader or who qualifies as someone who holds the world spirit within them. In Benjamin’s reading I feel as though he depicts the same ideas that Weber does. He talks about the idea that only the people who walk over people (stomping them down on their way) are the ones who rise above the rest. They are the ones that become the charismatic leaders; they are the ones who we learn about in history. As Benjamin said “the story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove”, to me this quote is saying that we pick and choose what we put in the textbooks. Since we pick what we want to be included in the textbooks we usually only learn about the people who rise above the rest, the ones with charismatic authority, and the ones who hold the world spirit.

This is really similar to the news stories that we hear about, we only hear what the reporters want us to hear and not the actual story. Why? Well for the exact reasons that Benjamin, Weber and Loewen say…we only hear about the charismatic authorities and the people who rise above the rest.