The Abdication of Reason: (your assignment, class, is to go to the dictionary and look up "abdication" and "reason".)

"One of our great problems is to see clearly what we have to resist. I would say that at the moment we have to understand better than we do the war mentality. If we do not understand it, we run the risk of contributing to its confusions and thereby helping the enemies of man and of peace. The great danger is that under the pressures of anxiety and fear, the alternation of crisis and relaxation and new crisis, the people of the world will come to accept gradually the idea of war, the idea of submission to total power, and the abdication of reason, spirit and individual conscience. The great peril is the deadening of conscience."
-----------Thomas Merton, "The Hidden Ground of Love"