Enjoying the view from Limbo
The most disturbing and dangerous aspect of The Pandemic that Ate a Planet, according to our friends at Chicken Little News (the official information forum of foxywoxy.gov), is the fact that such a high proportion of its victims never get sick, as though it would somehow be better if a higher proportion of the infected required hospitalization. In this irrational End-Times climate of...
I prefer feeling anxiously alone to feeling safely swaddled within a crowd. I prefer ideas that leave me uncomfortable in my weakness to ideas that satisfy my weakest inclinations. I prefer looking at things squarely to rounding off the edges of my vision for the sake of stability. I prefer the constant hum of disquiet that comes of acknowledging the vast unknown to...
If the mind — consciousness, thought, will — is an illusion of the brain, as our modern scientific religion insists, then whose illusion is it? After all, the brain itself, as a recognizable and definable entity, would, on this view, have to be nothing but another facet of the illusion. In other words, the brain itself is an object of conscious thought, and...
A student recently sent me a short e-mail consisting almost entirely of this thought: “Desire for recognition from others, including co-workers, family, friends…I really hate this.” The topic is worthy of serious consideration. Let us take a moment to examine this strange but all-too-common tendency in humans, the “desire for recognition.” It is unlikely that human beings could ever completely numb themselves to...
Jumping on the Civilizational Suicide Express, NASA has announced that it will cease using nicknames for planets and other cosmic objects that might be considered “offensive.” The prime examples of “offensive” names offered by the space agency: “Eskimo Nebula” and “Siamese Twins Galaxy.” Yes, really. The first example has gone by that nickname due to a feature well-represented in a spectacular NASA photo...
Twitter recently limited the user privileges of Donald Trump Jr., for the peculiar “offense” of citing a popular video (which I have not seen) in which a group of Houston doctors claim to have used hydroxychloroquine successfully in treating COVID-19. The social media company — which in my opinion ought to have every legal right to make such a decision — defended its...
The other day, a student of a taciturn and sometimes pessimistic temperament, whom I have counselled for the past couple of years as she tries to reorient her life, sent a short e-mail to tell me about her interesting and enjoyable first day at a new, temporary job. “Thank you for making me do something,” she wrote. “I mean your giving me some...
I am not one who often dreams vividly, or typically remembers his dreams. However, since childhood, I have occasionally had extremely clear, easily memorable dreams, some of them recurring ones, of the sort that seem to highlight my spiritual condition at a certain time. Strangely, I have experienced two dreams of this type recently, which I will relate to you now, as accurately...
Given the continuous coronavirus fearmongering and demands for lockdowns and mask mandates, combined with endless expert “advisories” declaring that there can be no return to even some parts of normal life on this planet until there is a COVID-19 vaccine, common sense dictates that we — I mean all of us on Earth — are about to be confronted with new universal compulsory...
Among Nietzsche’s many excellent insights into the mind of nineteenth-century socialism, here is one from his early days (1878) that particularly appeals to my way of thinking: The Socialists demand a comfortable life for the greatest possible number. If the lasting house of this life of comfort, the perfect State, had really been attained, then this life of comfort would have destroyed the...
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