Enjoying the view from Limbo
A man lives in fear of saying the wrong thing, lest he be abandoned. Yet in truth the knowledge that they will abandon you if you say the wrong thing is all the more reason not to care what they want you to say.
The only legitimate purpose of amusement is as an efficient and necessary means of restoring the soul’s energy…
Fool’s atheism.– “Why would an omnipotent and benevolent God allow evil things to happen?” So says the scientific fool with great smugness, believing he has thereby confounded the essence of all faith. The problem is that this very question reveals the nihilistic and trivial perspective of the questioner, based as it is upon a child’s presumption of absolute certainty, and an infant’s standard...
To the extent that we are social animals, we all have an urge to help. The problem is that we also have a common weakness — perhaps, paradoxically, an expression of our lust for power — for confusing helping with “making the problem go away.” Nietzsche observes, in The Gay Science, that the “religion of pity” thrives on the self-important air of the...
Who would harm me envies me. Who would harm the world envies all. The former honors me with his flattering hatred. The latter is a groveling worm beneath my foot, a tyrant in spirit…
If you have seen any news coverage of the Sri Lankan bombings, whether on the internet, in a newspaper, or on television, you have no doubt seen many images of random strangers wailing uncontrollably. This is the most popular and pervasive sort of imagery in these cases, because it responds to an instinctive weakness in the human soul that has been heightened, normalized,...
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