Enjoying the view from Limbo
Communist Canada / Liberty's Labors Lost / Pandemic that Ate a Planet / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 18, 2021
You never know what you have till it’s gone and I wanted to know what I had, so I got rid of everything. — Steven Wright, stand-up comedian.
I can think of no more psychologically incisive summary of this moment in the trajectory of modern civilization. Modernity, as that term relates to the philosophical and political premises of the last four centuries…
If the purpose of life were simply to be alive in the biological sense, then every human being would have fulfilled his purpose at birth, or rather before birth, and would therefore stand to gain nothing by going through with the rest of the process — nothing but more time. But who would carry on merely for the sake of carrying on, without...
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 16, 2021 · Last modified February 24, 2021
This age has pushed its rational minority to the edge. It has become difficult to walk out amongst one’s fellow human beings today without being intermittently struck by the thought of how embarrassing it is to belong to the same species as these others — these bipedal sheep, these regressed pre-individuals. But there is a hint of madness in such a musing, of...
Practical freedom is the best condition for the development of good men — but freedom itself is no guarantor that good men will indeed develop, any more than having a comfortable notebook and a smooth-flowing pen will inevitably produce good writing. More often than not, good writing tools have facilitated the production of mountains of sludge. What if good political conditions are analogous...
If you see that the world is sick, and understand the sickness as the inevitable result of a toxic way of life, then you cannot help but feel, whenever you catch yourself acting as they do, using their words, or enjoying their pleasures, that you are like one who knowingly infects himself with a virus. In a diseased civilization, to be normal means...
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...
On our self-declared scientific atheists.— Those modern materialists who wield their atheism as a bludgeon to punish their inferiors are in effect demanding that their inability to fit something into their science be enforced as the limits of common sense for all men. This is nothing but their emotional shield against being proved wrong. The essence of true scientific thinking, by contrast, is...
We sing and dance. We tell easygoing jokes and eat delicious food. Our owners tighten the yoke sometimes to keep us humble. We watch our strongest boys play games and cheer for “our side,” just to imagine what it would be like if we were the owners, rather than the owned. The master jerks the chain, ever so judiciously, to remind us that...
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 22, 2020 · Last modified December 25, 2020
Strictly speaking, the opposite of life is not death, but rather non-life. Everything depends, then, on how one defines life, in order to determine, by implication, what non-life entails. That is to say, it is possible that death is not essentially opposed to life at all, if life is defined in such a way that non-life may be attributed to a being that...
Glenn Gould is “the musician’s musician.” That is to say, he appeals to those who wish, for purposes of their own egos, that being an attention-getting performer — a “star” — were equivalent to, or even definitive of, being a great artist. Murray Perahia, to take one obvious contrasting example, is the composer’s musician. He appeals to those attuned to the spirit of...
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