The document summarizes key passages from two sources. The first passage discusses how the mind belongs collectively to all of humanity through shared concepts like language, and that personal traits are both individual and universal. The second passage discusses how a free democracy requires a balance of political power so that no single group can dominate policymaking, forcing compromise and cooperation between citizens.

1. Check out these
sentences:
Credit: Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace by
Williams and Colomb

2. Far from being locked inside our own skins, inside
the “dungeons” of ourselves, we are now able to
recognize that our minds belong, quite naturally, to
a collective “mind,” a mind in which we share
everything that is mental, most obviously language
itself, and that the old boundaries of the skin is not
boundary at all but a membrane connecting the
inner and outer experience of existence. Our
intelligence, our wit, our cleverness, our unique
personalities--all are simultaneously “our own”
possessions and the world’s.
--Joyce Carol Oates “New Heaven and New Earth”

3. Let’s break that
down:

4. Far from being locked
inside our own skins,
inside the “dungeons” of ourselves,
we are now able to recognize

5. Long
introductory
series of phrases
Far from being locked
repeated inside our own skins,
preposition
inside the “dungeons” of ourselves,
we are now able to recognize
The Subject

6. RECOGNIZE...
that our minds belong, quite naturally, to a collective “mind,”
everything that is mental,
a mind in which we share
most obviously language
itself,
and
not boundary at all
but
that the old a membrane connecting
boundaries of the skin is the inner and outer
experience of existence.

7. “our own”
Our intelligence, possessions
our wit,
our cleverness, --all are simultaneously and
our unique
personalities the world’s.

8. One more
amazing
paragraph!

9. The national unity of a free people depends upon a
sufficiently even balance of political power to make it
impracticable for the administration to be arbitrary and for
the opposition to be revolutionary and irreconcilable.
Where that balance no longer exists, democracy perishes.
For unless all the citizens of a state are forced by
circumstances to compromise, unless they feel that they
can affect policy but that no one can wholly dominate it,
unless by habit and necessity they have to give and take,
freedom cannot be maintained.
Walter Lippman

12. This then is the heritage of pioneer experience,--a passionate
belief that a democracy was possible which should leave the
individual a part to play in free society and not make him a cog in
a machine operated from above; which trusted in the common
man, in his tolerance, his ability to adjust differences with good
humor, and to work out an American type from the contributions
of all nations--a type for which he would fight against those who
challenged it in arms, and for which in time of war he would
make sacrifices, even the temporary sacrifice of individual
freedom and his life, lest that freedom be lost forever.
Frederick Jackson Turner