Tagged: materialism

Dionysus for Literalists

If every social event, to be enjoyed to the fullest, must be accompanied by alcohol, this means that the real “event” is the drinking itself, while the social gathering is merely the accompaniment or sidelight. That is, if eating with friends, chatting with friends, camping with friends, and commiserating with friends, all have one thing in common — alcohol — then one is...

The Reason to Philosophize

Stoicism and (to a lesser extent) Epicureanism, two late Greek philosophic schools often regarded as relatively minor movements during the intervening centuries, have become fashionable of late, primarily thanks to popular philosophy — the realm of touring lecturers and media stars — which is not really philosophy at all, but rather a quasi-philosophic posture assumed in the manner of a self-help strategy, specifically...

People Whose Political Opinions Should Not Be Heeded, Part One

Business tycoons. I am speaking here not of the small business owner, craftsman, or entrepreneur who builds a good idea into a means of making a good living. The healthy society needs such individuals, and indeed, in the healthiest community such people would perhaps represent the largest contingent of the mature adult population. I am speaking, rather, of the men for whom wealth-getting...

Materialism’s Vested Interests

People with an inclination to rule are always keen to control and delimit the thoughts and attitudes of others as a means of protecting the exclusivity of their right to rule. Just as our tyrannical advocates of “lockdowns” and “stay-at-home orders” like to declare exceptions for “essential workers,” as this allows them to set the terms for all mankind regarding which work is...

Alien Logic, Part One

As I am sure everyone knows by now, the United States Federal Government is about to make its first (allegedly) open disclosure about UFOs, which they have renamed with the military-speak abstraction UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), presumably to avoid laughing every time they name the subject of the report. Since there are about a hundred different angles from which to come at this...

The Body

Modern scientific materialists are inclined, we might even say predisposed, to ask, “What is this thing you call ‘the soul,’ and why do you believe that you still need this notion, or for that matter that you have any right to assume it?” But we might just as easily turn these questions around on the moderns, and ask what they mean by “the...

The Great Debate: Socialism vs. Capitalism

Socialism mistakes productivity for greed. Capitalism concedes the point, and proceeds to mistake greed for virtue. Socialism believes there can be no freedom as long as there is private property ownership. Capitalism believes the legal right to hold material goods in one’s own name is a sufficient condition of freedom. Socialism asserts that it is wrong to judge men as better or worse...

Time vs. Life

Modern materialists, forever eager to debunk ancient notions of eternal being, have carelessly fostered a linguistic and psychological reduction of life, the activity of the soul, to time, the only remaining measure of man’s existence once eternity has been discarded as even a goal. But to reduce life to mere temporal continuation — to “time on Earth” — is inherently to overvalue mere...

The Brain Delusion

If the mind — consciousness, thought, will — is an illusion of the brain, as our modern scientific religion insists, then whose illusion is it? After all, the brain itself, as a recognizable and definable entity, would, on this view, have to be nothing but another facet of the illusion. In other words, the brain itself is an object of conscious thought, and...

The Irony of Nihilism: Mortal Dread

One of the paradoxes of this age that has forfeited all belief in a reality beyond immediate sense perception, and all humanity beyond the material mechanism, is that people, though no longer believing they exist, have become hysterically obsessed with prolonging their “life” (i.e., their illusory appearance of self-moving unity) regardless of the cost. No price is too high to pay for a...