Enjoying the view from Limbo
The more practical power one has (or believes one has), the less able one is to admit error or rethink previous decisions. The willing assumption of godlike authority, and by extension the creation of a permanent audience before whom one exercises that authority, seems to infuse the soul with a parallel dread of being seen to lack godlike infallibility. This dread (sometimes mistaken...
An activist is one who is so oppressed and tortured by his immoderate feelings that his only means of relief is to disperse his pain among others, demanding that everyone be oppressed and tortured by his (that is, the activist’s) feelings. An activist is one who is utterly without intellectual reserve, philosophic detachment, or the natural sense of irony born of learning to...
Non-progressive.— If I began compiling a list of all the personal and societal changes — practical and spiritual — that I firmly believe would greatly enhance human life in general if actualized, each item expressed in one sentence or less, it would likely result in the longest post in the five-plus-year history of this website. And yet, as certain as I am that...
Everyone is angry and outraged. Offended and shocked. An indignant crusader for justice. Above all, and most indicative of the mood of the age and the tenor of “public discourse,” everyone is absolutely, vehemently unwilling to brook disagreement. Today’s ideal teenager is a rabid-faced, frothing little girl overflowing with barely verbalized seething hatred toward all the grown-ups. Today’s ideal political representative is a...
“Love is blind,” they say. The same, however, might be said just as surely about anger, envy, indignation, and above all, fear. Any passion, if allowed to become dominant in the soul, causes blindness. For by highlighting an object exclusively so as to make it appear overwhelmingly preeminent within its context — which is in effect to remove the object from its proper...
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