Enjoying the view from Limbo
Do you believe that there are certain fundamental tensions in human nature, that these tensions are intractable, that the challenge of surviving these tensions reasonably well is essentially what living a good life means, and that finding one’s way through these incongruities of our nature is possible only or primarily at the individual level, which is not to say in isolation, but rather...
Decadence, in normal language, means “deterioration” or “decay.” (The Latin root suggests falling down and the French derivative form suggests decaying.) For a long time in English, the word has been used only about human behavior and social conditions. If we say someone is decadent, we are saying his way of life is deteriorating or wasteful, such as one who lives for luxury...
Hypocrisy.– Beware all public voices who cite the profit motive as evidence that someone or some organization is acting dishonorably, disingenuously, or without sincere regard for the public good — and who make these claims on a for-profit basis. Treat with extreme skepticism the motives or reasoning of anyone who preaches, with a material vested interest, about the vested interests behind someone else’s...
When theoretical reason is forsaken in favor of practical reason as the human standard — or, to say the same thing, when the theoretical is reduced to the status of handmaiden of the practical — this will necessarily have certain verifiable and visible effects on life in the civilization in which this reversed perspective takes hold. In brief, this reversal reduces thinking to...
There is very little profit to be made from the truth, whereas there is tremendous profit to be made from lies. The reason is simple: People pay for what they think they need, and most people feel an overwhelming need for comfort and reassurance, which are precisely what all effective lies (and liars) are offering. Truth, by contrast, neither cares what will make...
Everything today is for stupid people. If anything exists today that is not fundamentally aimed at the stupid, then it falls entirely outside the public eye, resides beyond social discourse, has no connection to the quasi-life that the society around you is engaged in. Hence, if anything you like, do, or care about does fall within the public eye, occupy a corner of...
To interpret a thing is to categorize it. We may categorize only in accordance with existing categories, of course, which in practice — an obvious point but one easily forgotten — means in accordance with categories we know. Hence, the limits of interpretation, for each man, are determined by the modes of existence that he himself has previously recognized or intuited from his...
Multiculturalism, a Newspeak fantasy initiated, predictably enough, in Canada, is a social theory that pretends to promote and defend all cultures, while in fact — and in true intention — diluting and neutering all cultures. It accomplishes this subterfuge by subordinating all cultures to the demands of a democratic egalitarian relativism which becomes, in effect, the new global super-culture, or, more accurately, anti-culture....
Finnish prime minister.– Late modern humanity is terminally boring, predictable, soulless, and finds its truest level of being in an imaginary world populated entirely by fifteen-year-olds raised by hookers and drug pushers. Jane Austen would not recognize this race. Wilde’s Dorian Gray, on his lowest night of drug-addicted slum prowling, would find the Finnish prime minister simply too gross and bland to be...
Magnifying Lens.– Everything that is ugly, corrupt, degrading, demoralizing, and cheapening about modern life (or is it just human nature?) is deepened and broadened in a big city. My rough calculation, after a few recent visits to Seoul: For each million people added, the vices and ruptures in civil society that are intrinsic to city life are multiplied in severity ten times. More...
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