Enjoying the view from Limbo
According to progressive morality, which is really progressive politics, to disagree with or disrespect someone’s choices and attitudes — provided they are the correct choices and attitudes of the moment — is to violate his rights. This is tantamount to saying that rights are essentially protections against being judged. To judge a person’s preferences (in relativist lingo, his “lifestyle”) is thus inherently to...
Everything that makes life worth living is something we do not have. That is how it makes life worth living. If we had it, there would be no reason to continue. This means that desire is the source of everything meaningful in our lives. The voices of the modern world shout at us every day, from every rooftop, that we should “live for our...
About a week ago, I noted here that the global governance consortium and its media spokesmen are currently in a race against time to impose universal vaccination on every human being as a moral and regulatory condition for being allowed to participate in “normal life” again. They are doing this partly to serve the financial interests of the big pharmaceutical companies and their...
He makes choices on the basis of immediate inclination or whim, and categorically rejects the pre-moral concept of delayed gratification as an oppressive constraint on his freedom. He believes that his merely wanting something is sufficient evidence of his right to have it, and therefore answers any objection to the immediate fulfillment of his wishes with, “But I want it!” — regarding this...
Doing as one is supposed to do (obeying rules or duties) is a substantially different thing from doing as one ought to do (acting virtuously). The former type of action is suitable for dependent children, the mentally deficient, or in general those who for some reason have either opted or been forced to relinquish their authority to decide for themselves, whether universally or...
For all other animals, maturation involves growing into their bodies. For man alone, maturation involves growing out of his body. Those who deny the existence of truth are absolutely certain they are right. On the other hand, genuine believers in truth rarely claim to be certain of anything. The former hope to find their reason for living in their certainty. The latter find...
In 1932, millions of Germans — the most educationally “advanced” of peoples at the time — understandably felt betrayed by a corrupt political and financial elite, and hence surmised that even if you disliked his manner and distrusted some of his advisers, this Hitler fellow was making many important points. “At least he loves his country and wants to make Germany great again.”...
No one intuits the basic moral tenor of an age more clearly than those with a vested professional interest in accommodating themselves to that tenor for personal gain, such as advertisers and other pitchmen. If you want to understand the moral condition and collective priorities of your social environment, spend a day analyzing the advertising techniques and campaigns most pervasive in the mass...
Fyodor Dostoevsky is one of the unquestionable giants of world literature: essential to the development of the nineteenth century anti-romantic novel; one of his century’s two great prophets and critics (Nietzsche being the other) of the then-growing nihilism that was devouring European intellectual life, and has since — as he (like Nietzsche) predicted — settled like volcanic ash over the entire civilized world;...
One of the most disturbing social symptoms of America’s coronavirus epidemic is a malady we may call mathematical hysteria: the inability, and even unwillingness, of millions of ordinarily rational adults to look at the numbers dancing before their panic-stricken minds with any sort of context-related sobriety. And perhaps the ugliest manifestation of this mathematical hysteria is the moral argument that this outbreak warrants...
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