Enjoying the view from Limbo
A common classroom activity is to ask students to speak or write about what they would do if they were “king for a day.” I hate that activity, as it fosters the notion that absolute power is desirable; and to my recollection, I have yet to hear of a single child—or adult—giving the proper answer: “I would abolish the monarchy.” Modern civilization desperately...
Yesterday, as occasionally happens, a good student who has maintained a regular correspondence with me even after graduation, and who is an avid reader of modern and classic literature, sent me this simple message regarding her future prospects: “I think I want to be a writer.” The following is my reply. What does that mean, “I want to be a writer”? A writer...
In this age of no-fault faults, and tolerance reinvented as a form of moral lobotomy, nothing could be more antithetical than a dose of good old-fashioned discrimination, which is to say judgment that dares to speak its name. Hence, since I am nothing to this age if not antithetical, I take this moment to reveal my personal identity in the only form anyone...
Among Nietzsche’s many excellent insights into the mind of nineteenth-century socialism, here is one from his early days (1878) that particularly appeals to my way of thinking: The Socialists demand a comfortable life for the greatest possible number. If the lasting house of this life of comfort, the perfect State, had really been attained, then this life of comfort would have destroyed the...
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