Enjoying the view from Limbo
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 4, 2020 · Last modified December 5, 2020
To escape a perceived object of fear, late modern humanity will eagerly sacrifice anything — up to and including human life itself, the soul of man. In self-defeating hopes of protecting his most worthless and subhuman objects of desire — immediate comfort and immediate pleasure — late modern man will enslave both himself and his neighbor without hesitation, even seemingly without differentiation, thereby...
A country that raises most of its children in compulsory retardation factories will end up with an adult majority incapable of thinking rationally, restraining whims, understanding the long-term implications of choices, or voting like informed and responsible free men. No one should be surprised by this. If forty-seven percent of a nation’s voters sincerely believe that their best chance to save their country...
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...
As the city aggrandizes itself, it carelessly obliterates the night sky. On the clearest night these days, no more than a few stars are visible from my neighborhood. Artificial light spreads and engulfs all with its perpetual gaudy clarity, hiding the natural obscurity that once provided the divine backdrop highlighting the distant presence of the most ancient light, thus serving as man’s daily...
Carlyle wrote, “No pressure, no diamonds.” That is very true. We might also add the unstated implication of Carlyle’s epigram: “No pressure, dull carbon — which is to say graphite.” As modernity reduces the heat and pressure of existence, humanity produces fewer and fewer diamonds, instead becoming increasingly uniform and stable in softness, adherence, and conductivity. A useful writing implement or fuel cell;...
We are watching something remarkable, namely a civilization committing suicide. Those of us who see clearly what is happening have traveled, in the course of just a few short weeks, through several stages of realization: from bemusement at people’s susceptibility to media manipulation, to frustration at their deference to excessive authority, to alarm at their willingness to sacrifice societal foundations in the name...
We are witnessing the end of modernity, in so far as that word names a civilization. The age founded in dreams of individual liberty has reached its absolute negation, with modern man, both collectively and in the private soul of almost every living human, having been reduced — or rather having reduced himself — to a slave demanding, even begging for, ever-stronger chains....
If there were no world, there would be only me — and therefore I would not exist. From this, it might also follow, contrary to the modern moan about man’s insignificance within the vastness of time and space, that my own existence is broadened, expanded, and deepened, precisely in proportion to the breadth, expanse, and depth of the world’s existence. The relevant question...
Recently, a student with whom I frequently discuss books and ideas mentioned in an e-mail — God forbid that two humans should meet in the same room these days — that she had just read Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (a book that is extremely popular here in Korea), and was keen to discuss it with me. As I have been a sort of...
This American moment looks strikingly similar to the early days of the Trump cult. Much as we saw in early 2016, people who formerly seemed reasonable and reasonably “conservative” are being peeled away from their reason and into media-stoked lunacy over this virus outbreak, and suddenly turning on anyone who dares to espouse the principles in regard to this issue that they themselves...
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