Tagged: popularity

Reflections on Thinking For An Audience

Public Intellectual.— Your mind shrinks to the size of your audience. The more frequently you accept the artificial self-reduction of speaking to please the smallminded — or rather the more you invite the spiritual diminution of needing to please them — the more likely it is to become a permanent condition, such that you gradually become less able to expand your thoughts back...

On Being Liked

The dependent man tends to judge himself more highly to the extent that he is liked by others, and therefore feels a compelling vested interest in gaining approval, which is to say that he increasingly uses others’ acceptance of him as an emotional surrogate for the self-understanding that he lacks. This tendency naturally drives him ever farther from any considerations of the good,...

Anti-Elitism

Hatred of “elitism,” with its inherent suspicion of anything that seems to imply a standard of human superiority, follows inevitably from long immersion in political and moral egalitarianism. Democracy, the political product of the principle of equality run amok, is the fertile soil of egalitarianism’s most spiritually invasive weeds, gradually fostering a general, almost instinctive anti-elitism. In practice, this anti-elitism constitutes a most...

Safety In Numbers

On the philosophers and the sophists– Heraclitus: “One man is worth ten thousand if he be the best.” Jordan Peterson: “Why be a rigorous teacher for three hundred university students when I could be a self-help guru for three million YouTube subscribers!” On self-government– The less centralized the state, the more localized the rule. The aim is to approximate as far as possible...

A Word from the Rock Star of Limbo

It has become part of the vernacular these days to describe anyone whom one admires or who has become prominent in any arena whatsoever as “a rock star.” Just today, for example, I noticed an online commenter at Right Scoop describing outgoing White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders — a frumpy but loyal professional apologist for idiocy — as having been “a...