Enjoying the view from Limbo
On social media.– I have never once wondered what Plato ate for lunch. Nor what Dante looked like on the beach, what Shakespeare gave his children for their birthdays, where Vivaldi spent his summer vacation, or which card game Swift played with Stella. Yet our world is now awash in the lunches, beach pictures, birthday parties, vacation diaries, and personal hobbies of a...
A few more ways that I am at odds with today: I would rather live in a world with many things to fear than in a world with nothing to fear, because the opposite preference represents the emotional state of a child — and implies the practical conditions of a slave. It is preferable to live in a society in which people care...
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...
A team is where a boy can prove his courage on his own. A gang is where a coward goes to hide. –Mickey Mantle, The Quality of Courage (Bison Books edition, 1999), 90 Collectivism, as a moral premise, is essentially the denial of the ultimate value, or rather the ultimate existence, of the individual. Individualism, as that term is used all too often...
Applause.— In applause there is always a kind of noise–even when we applaud ourselves. — Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Kaufmann translation), §201. Had Nietzsche been a little older when he wrote those words, he might have said “especially when we applaud ourselves.” Applause is always partly noise,...
“What if everyone joined the crowd except me? What if everyone were smiling, growling, hissing, chanting, cheering, and singing, but I were not included? What if, having grown tired or frightened of being left out — or rather, of the strain of standing apart — I should discover that they would no longer accept me at all? That I had missed my chance...
Spectator sports often teach us a lot about the people, or rather peoples, who make them popular. There is nothing new about this, of course. Seneca taught us as much about the state of Roman society in his time as about his own Stoic sensibilities, when he wrote, in his Moral Letter “On Crowds”: But nothing is so damaging to good character as...
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