Tagged: fear

Late Modern Passions

To escape a perceived object of fear, late modern humanity will eagerly sacrifice anything — up to and including human life itself, the soul of man. In self-defeating hopes of protecting his most worthless and subhuman objects of desire — immediate comfort and immediate pleasure — late modern man will enslave both himself and his neighbor without hesitation, even seemingly without differentiation, thereby...

Herd Immunity, Tyrant Style

Back at the very beginning of Global Totalitarian Lockdown Fever, in Italy, the justification offered for the extreme assault on individual liberty was that the death rate from COVID-19 was so terrifyingly high that governments ought to spare absolutely no effort to curtail the spread of the virus at all costs. At that time, I argued loudly and repeatedly that this reasoning was...

Fear and Shame

How many elderly people will spend the last year of their lives isolated from most of their kin, wishing in futility for one last family holiday gathering that will be denied them by holier-than-thou politicians and self-righteously “compassionate” family members? — all those politicians and family members pretending that they are depriving these old folks of their last moments of earthly joy out...

A Few Worse Plagues Than COVID

This autumn, Pope Francis shocked the world by finally saying something rational, religious, and rhetorically out of step with this progressive moment — the occasion was duly noted here in Limbo — namely that “gossiping is a worse plague than COVID.” As my adopted home of South Korea gradually returns to something the government calls “Level 1.5” social distancing (don’t ask), thus more...

Fear of Death, Fear as Death

Death comes to all, whether we imagine it everywhere and spend our lives running and hiding from it, whether we seek and embrace it in an act of cowardly bravado aimed at alleviating our overactive imaginations, or whether we simply live our lives to the best of our abilities secure in the awareness that someday it will come. It is coming in any...

Distortions of Proximity

The essence of education is the gradual widening of horizons, which means, most precisely, the extension of one’s view of life, which is necessarily limited at the outset to one’s nearest and most immediate surroundings, to encompass increasingly distant and obscure elements of existence. The widened horizon, in turn, provides a truer context within which to perceive and understand the near and immediate....

Watch out, the last wave is a doozy!

You have been hearing it for months. It has been a constant background chatter, a shiver at the surface of daily life. It insinuates itself into almost every conversation with relatives, old friends, coworkers, random acquaintances. “This virus is so frightening.” “I’m worried about my kids getting this thing.” “What scares me is the second wave — that might be even worse!” Late...

On the Fear of Death

Today, hundreds of millions of men and women from most of the nations of the developed world have been herded into mass hysteria and precipitous panic over a virus outbreak that has proved to be no more ravaging than a bad flu season, an illness that is having its severest effects mostly among the small proportion of the population that is already at...

The Last Adult in the Room

During this Pandemic that Ate a Planet, Sweden and Sweden alone has refused to be sucked into the vortex of self-interested media fearmongering, progressive globalist propaganda, and totalitarian social experimentation. She has refused to succumb to the abject, life-annihilating terror of death; refused to play the immature game of prolonging the inevitable by hiding under the bed hoping that somehow an unpleasant reality...

What Not to Do

Popular sages and life-advice dispensers are very good at issuing ready-made, one-size-fits-all commandments on how to live well. They tend not to be quite so good at following their own advice, however, partly for the obvious reason that most easily-synopsized “rules for living” must be kept so nebulous or generic in form that one who is clever enough, and motivated enough, will always...