Enjoying the view from Limbo
If someone told you, in the form of an ultimatum, that the only way to combat some new crisis or impending disaster was to submit yourself, your family, and your friends, to a permanent and institutionally self-perpetuating tyranny, i.e., the enslavement of the vast majority of the human population under a universal regime untethered from any notion of intractable and fundamental limits on...
When theoretical reason is forsaken in favor of practical reason as the human standard — or, to say the same thing, when the theoretical is reduced to the status of handmaiden of the practical — this will necessarily have certain verifiable and visible effects on life in the civilization in which this reversed perspective takes hold. In brief, this reversal reduces thinking to...
The more practical power one has (or believes one has), the less able one is to admit error or rethink previous decisions. The willing assumption of godlike authority, and by extension the creation of a permanent audience before whom one exercises that authority, seems to infuse the soul with a parallel dread of being seen to lack godlike infallibility. This dread (sometimes mistaken...
Tyrants and time.— In the final years of an ambitious tyrant’s reign, he typically takes his shot at ultimate glory — and ultimately hits himself. Why? Because he mistimes the shot. All his earlier calculations and preparations were undertaken with patience and painstaking forethought, so much so that the preparation and forethought themselves almost became the essence of the game. At the end,...
Everyone knows that a greedy man will never reach the limits of his desire for more, for it is the essence of greed to acknowledge no natural limit to its ambition. Everyone knows totalitarians are intrinsically, definitively, obsessed with totality with respect to control, and that an obsession with totality admits of no inherent restraint or misgivings, for totalism in the quest for...
During the acknowledged period of the Cold War (which never really ended), the nuclear risk, though serious, was always somewhat mitigated by the fact that the Soviet Union’s goals and strategies were systemic, rather than personal. That is, the Cold War was waged not against one unstable individual who, if feeling threatened — including from within his own country — might become rabid...
I love and cherish freedom — not the word, not a particular material advantage that I associate with some byproduct of freedom, but the thing itself. This is a testament to the power of imagination, and to love’s natural capacity for clinging to ideals; for I have never seen real freedom in my midst, let alone experienced it with any fullness in my...
You cannot make this stuff up. Here is the first sentence of a new Politico rah-rah piece on the United Nations’ “tough” response to Vladimir Putin’s military invasion of Ukraine: U.N. Security Council members had one clear message for Russian President Vladimir Putin: We know what you’re up to, and you need to quit it now — or else. “Or else” what? We...
During the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, those of us naturally inclined to resist propagandistic media hyperbole and distrust tyrannical models of government “efficiency” spent a good deal of our time, and inordinate amounts of our nerves, arguing with some of the dumbest or most fear-driven humans we had ever encountered, over the strange new question of whether allowing the governments of...
The most dehumanizing aspect of enslavement is the sense of completely losing control of one’s essential actions, i.e., of having one’s realm of practical choice, such as it is, reduced to the inessential and transitory. The most desperate aspect of incremental enslavement is the awareness that one is in the process of losing control of one’s essential actions. The most infuriating aspect of...
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