Enjoying the view from Limbo
The absolute worst and most immoral thing to do would be to assist Ukraine’s effort in its war of self-defense just enough, and just long enough, to heighten the severity of the conflict and ensure that millions of innocent people will be killed or displaced, and then to get skittish, pull back, and become all prudish and pragmatic about not wanting to disrupt...
There is a bias today in favor of simpler, easier-to-understand language. We see it in education systems, in word processing programs’ auto-correct protocols, and in the rise (clever business in an age of school-indoctrinated illiteracy) of for-profit proofreading companies such as Grammarly. Though seemingly apolitical in nature, this ubiquitous impulse to verbal and written simplicity comes from the same ultimate source as the...
I have always scoffed, publicly and privately, at the fanciful notion that the United States “won the Cold War.” No. Ronald Reagan won a battle in that war, but by no means the final battle. Since Reagan’s achievement, the U.S., along with the West in general, has left Russia to freely rearm and develop its strategy for long-term renewal. We are seeing the...
Tyranny is a gossip whispering anxiously about his neighbors. Democracy is a crowd alternately screaming its envy and singing its lust. Freedom is a lively and unconstrained conversation among equals. The tyrant and the democrat are therefore united in their hatred of the free man — the former, because the free man appears impervious to gossip, and is therefore a threat to the...
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...
I saw a headline from Fox News (where else?) declaring that Mark Levin — former “conservative radio firebrand,” now Republican establishment populist for cash — has said that Joe Biden is the closest thing to a dictator that America has ever had. That’s rich, coming from a man who, just five years ago, publicly sold his soul and his former Tea Party audience...
Can one be a successful politician without actively giving up the higher spiritual pursuits? That is, can one pursue a political career — in which effectiveness is built on the appearance of certainty, the rejection of doubts, and the reduction of all matters to action, agreement, and funding — without forsaking the love of the beautiful, the longing for truth, and the quest...
Meaning is definition. The meaning of life is therefore essentially the definition of life. Hence, the search for the meaning of life is a search for a definition that will tell us what we are really doing when we live, or (if we believe in freedom of the will) what we ought to be doing. I emphasize the point that meaning is definition...
Modern politicians smile for the cameras because they want to look normal and like “one of the people.” When they smile — at nothing, as a pose, to present themselves as smilers — they look like idiots who do not take life or politics seriously. Hence, they achieve their end perfectly: They look eminently normal. They look exactly like “the people.” Today’s political...
What was the democratic world fifteen months ago? Clearly, it was not what it appeared to be, even to the most hardened skeptics and cynics. It is one thing to believe, as the skeptics and cynics did at that time, that most men, if push came to shove, would choose comfort over freedom, and would succumb to promises of security at the expense...
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