Enjoying the view from Limbo
Anyone can exert himself on the good days. One who does only that will become a middling being, at most. For greatness lies largely in the ability to exert oneself on the bad days. To get out of bed when hiding under the sheets and wishing it all away is the only attractive option. To look them in the eye when you would...
From Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. You want, if possible — and there is no more insane “if possible” — to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it — that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and...
In a classic example of the way progressivism, like all aggressive irrationalism, devours itself, we have the spectacle of the ubiquitous and increasingly literal policing of politically incorrect attitudes, a social deformity which has now grown into its final (in the sense of fatal) shape: today’s infantile world of safe spaces and public shaming. For generations, progressives attacked so-called social conservatives for their...
Our age is obsessed with pleasure. And pleasure, in our materialist late modernity, has been defined down to its emptiest core: the active rejection and anxious avoidance of pain, every kind of pain, from the most superficial discomfort with one’s immediate situation (consider our fixation on the evils of “stress”) to the relativization and diminution of all purposes and relationships. God forbid, after...
Alabama has passed a law, which the state’s governor nevertheless imagines will be unenforceable for the time being, making it a felony to perform an abortion in that state, with the only exception being cases in which the life of the mother is threatened. I am pleased to see this law passed, not merely because I believe abortion is indefensible in a modern, rights-based...
If the distance between what you are and what you wish to be matters more to you than the distance between what you are feeling at this moment and what you would like to be feeling at this moment, then you are no longer a child. If the distance between what you are doing and what you wish to be doing matters more...
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