Enjoying the view from Limbo
A student who frequently writes to me about her efforts to overcome self-doubts and develop a more moderate, reasonable way of life, told me of an exchange she had recently with a friend who was trying to persuade her that she ought to be happier. The friend offered three specific arguments, which my student summarized as follows: 1. You have no disorder in...
A pandemic — even a second-level one by historical standards — is a totalitarian’s dream come true. Suddenly, progressives have complete, hysteria-induced access to all the moral weaponry they have tried to invoke for years in the name of “global climate change” with only partial success. The whole thrust of the climate change movement, since its beginnings fifty years ago, has been to...
It is true that after four years of Trump’s vulgar divisiveness, following eight years of Obama’s slick divisiveness, America needs a “uniter.” Joe Biden will not be one. Contrary to all the Forrest Gump fantasies of the popular psyche, an addled mind cannot accidentally happen upon the kind of subtle understanding and persuasive decency required to effect significant societal change in the direction...
Joe Biden has been sworn in as President of the Nation Formerly Known as The United States of America. He won the historic first election in which the two leading candidates were arguably the two dumbest men in America — just as his predecessor, Donald J. Trump, had previously won the historic first election featuring the two worst human beings in America. For...
It is not weak, nor any contradiction of the desire for independence, to look to others’ opinions in assessing one’s own thoughts and behavior. The mistake or weakness is in looking to others’ opinions at random — looking to the crowd, or to the popular, or to the powerful. One has already made a great advance in self-knowledge and independence who is able...
A society in which the great mass of the population has no shared idea of what human life is supposed to be is not a community. If that social division includes fundamental disagreements about the proper relationship between citizen and government, then the society is in faction. If, in turn, this political divide consists of one or more large parties seeking to use...
A healthy community is one in which a reasonable person may expect to find basic goodwill, common sense, and a foundational level of mutual respect in the majority of his fellow men. This man will, in other words, live his daily life as though these conditions may be presumed to obtain in ordinary circumstances, though of course understanding, in theory, that there will...
Benjamin Netanyahu, a hero of the North American “conservative media” (because he is almost as big a fraud as they are), has put Israel in the lead in universal (fake) vaccination for a wildly exaggerated non-cataclysmic pandemic — by selling his entire nation’s medical records (i.e., personal privacy) to Pfizer, the pharmaceutical behemoth providing the under-tested pseudo-vaccine. Yes, he really did that. In...
Twittering into tyranny.– The thrill of pith has been universalized, thereby infinitely diminishing the value, not to mention the standard, of pithiness. Today, men may become leaders of nations, or the favorites of millions, merely by saying “I hate them,” or “I love you,” at an opportune moment — particularly by saying it loudly, witlessly, and condescendingly. In such a universe, the man...
If you see that the world is sick, and understand the sickness as the inevitable result of a toxic way of life, then you cannot help but feel, whenever you catch yourself acting as they do, using their words, or enjoying their pleasures, that you are like one who knowingly infects himself with a virus. In a diseased civilization, to be normal means...
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