Enjoying the view from Limbo
2020 U.S. Election / America Descending / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 26, 2020
I gave this post its very formal, impressive title as a simple bit of irony. If you are an American voter, and you wish to vote for someone who might actually have a chance of winning the 2020 United States Presidential Election, you must vote for Republican Donald Trump, a lifelong world famous crap merchant, or Joe Biden, a babbling fool who has...
The cosmos self-corrects, and that certainly includes the human portion of the cosmos, to the extent it may be regarded separately. One might object that to say the cosmos self-corrects is to suggest that “The Whole” itself is flawed, which might reasonably lead one to ask, “Flawed against what standard?” Nevertheless it is so, although I prefer to say incomplete rather than flawed...
In Utopia, the presumed goal in confronting a new virus would be to prevent a single death, a single illness, even a single infection. With an imaginary social purity, defined in the narrowest physical terms, as the overriding purpose, there would be absolutely nothing — no folly, no delusion, no atrocity — Utopia would not commit (or submit to) in the name of...
An ideal to be approached as closely as possible, in as many ways as possible, and with as much self-examining honesty as possible: Attach yourself only to people who make you better. Completely avoid those who make you worse. Those who make you neither better nor worse become the latter with frequent association, due to wasted time; therefore, avoid this third group too,...
A student sent me an e-mail yesterday which consisted of one simply-worded, but far from simplistic, question: “How can I be rational?” The question has perennial importance, of course, and may in a sense be the defining concern of the human soul. However, as the obstacles to living in accordance with reason grow more pervasive and pernicious with each generation, the notion of “being...
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 12, 2019 · Last modified February 14, 2019
(If you have not done so, please read Part One and Part Two.) I concluded Part Two of this series with the challenge, directed at all my students, real and hypothetical: “Why are you living a life you don’t want?” In a sense, the answer is obvious: Because they don’t know what life they want. In fact, I believe the problem is even...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 29, 2018 · Last modified August 1, 2018
Modernity is, or was, the age of the triumph of practical reason, and the flourishing and harnessing of an emancipated desire for earthly wellbeing and individual self-determination. Its definitive political development was the limited republic, the premise of which was that normal human beings left to their own devices will sort themselves into a reasonable public shape beneficial to all, and the necessary...
To all my American readers and friends — and that would be the majority in both categories — Happy Fourth of July from here in Limbo! This is a less than stellar moment for your nation, to put it mildly, but there is no reason not to take a day to appreciate all that is and has been great about modernity’s most...
In 2008, America elected a president from a broken home whose mother was sympathetic to communists; who as a youngster had formative relationships with a transgender nanny chosen by his mother and a bisexual communist pornographer “mentor” chosen by his grandfather; whose teenage friends were so devoted to drug use that they gave themselves a nickname derived from this habit, and developed their...
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