An Ideal Use of Time

Our attempt to apply the democratic process to every affair of our daily lives is wasting everybody’s time. Nevertheless it is helping us to achieve our ideals. Through common uselessness we are advancing toward equality.

Cowardly Ignorance

We define wisdom as knowing what everybody else is doing. Anyone therefore who does not give a large part of his life to the popular media is considered either ignorant or suspect. “Where do you find the time to read literature?” a man asked me once, insisting that after he had read the newspapers and the magazines and had watched the news on television, he did not have time to pick up a book. I replied that I did not read the newspapers or the magazines and did not watch the news on television. His jaw dropped in disbelief. “How do you know what’s going on?” he cried. It crossed my mind that I might try to explain to him how literature opened your eyes to your surroundings and how the media blinded them by contrast; but my tongue tied as he stared superciliously at me. “I would rather not know,” I said in the end; “I do not have the courage to face it.”

Task-Master

The ideals of capitalism teach us that if someone is willing to pay us to perform a task, doing it will give us worth. Faithfully we expend ourselves in our attempt to attain the justification of our existence. But if someone is willing to pay us in return for our exertion, the task by itself must lack intrinsic value and without compensation would go undone. We earn money from it, that is all, and give up our only life to do it. We become petty occupations rather than ourselves and are fated to die as if we had never lived.

Oppressive Ethics

By now the words “oppressors” and “oppressed” symbolize many people who are neither, but nobody is free of his symbol. If you are marked by the former you must repent and seek forgiveness. If you are marked by the latter, you are one of the chosen and have attractive privileges, such as the right to redistributed wealth and the right to slander the oppressors. The oppressed demand Christian morality from the oppressors while permitting themselves an eye for an eye. How much longer will this literal evolution of Judaeo-Christian ethics give the Western world a good perception of itself?

In Need of Repairs

Individuals are inventive in their pointing out the general evils and outrages of the past. They search especially for those which will justify financial reparations to themselves.

Fission or Fusion

People who talk about “family” and look for its foundation in Christianity sense that something in the human condition is unhealthy. Christianity as a solution is an illusion though. It is a universalizing agent, and universilization is our illness, no matter what its present mutation is. Families are the smallest and strongest of human groupings, and like atoms they resist division. They are strong by nature and do not need theoretical binding. They do not need to be defined or justified by something unseen to give them their identity and validity. Nothing tangible does. What weakens them is any belief in the unification of mankind based upon intangible and unprovable principles. When mankind attempts to unify, families split. If we look to the past and see evidence of more coherent families, it is naive to conclude that Christianity was the source of coherence, simply because it predominated at the time. Let us look beyond Christianity. In the ancient world families were stronger yet. Christ was not the champion of the earthly and temporal family. He was celibate and promoted the everlasting family of God. Marriage only merits secondary and inferior approval in the New Testament. How can we appeal to Christianity in our despair over familial disintegration? This disintegration has been steadily taking place over the course of our history in the West, and Christianity has made its contribution to it. We either embrace the disintegration and the present stage of universalism, whatever it might be, or we make a stand against universalism in any guise. To return to an earlier stage of it is not to contest it.

A Block Observed

No matter how much talent someone has, he cannot write anything if he has nothing to say. Those who write for the sake of writing are no more profound than those who speak for the sake of speaking.

A Well Calculated Paradox

In the age of progress we learn to trust the accumulation of knowledge over time, and to prefer the inexperienced opinions of the young to the seasoned insights of the old.

Perceived Danger

People are dangerous not because there is something wicked about them but because they are malleable. Why are they malleable? They have an innate need to be well perceived, and the easiest way to be well perceived is to imitate the latest idol.

Moral Progress and the Natural Process

The irony of our belief in moral progress is that we as individuals cannot avoid becoming part of the condemned past. We glorify youth and despise the natural process of aging. Physical health becomes an obsession, and the physician who is anything short of divine gets sued.

An Idea of Love

When we try to love everybody, we love an idea rather than people of flesh and blood. In the end, someone who loves everyone is in love with nobody but himself.

Acknowledgment by Representation

When representation replaces reality, the universalists triumph. For they gain the authority to force others to acknowledge what is not worth acknowledging.

Exceptional Lack of Freedom

When exceptions become the rule, it is possible for everybody to be well perceived. There is no freedom whatsoever under these conditions, but what is freedom compared to universal self-approval?

Legal Realization

For some reason moral visions frequently realize themselves as the legislated redistribution of money and property.

Price of Disobedience

Only those who learn how to obey become fit to rule. When the young are taught disobedience, society pays the price. For when these young themselves come of age, not only do they not know how to rule, they are not worthy to be obeyed.

Popular Endorsement

The great benefit of endorsing a popular ideal is that you can make a conspicuous show of your own goodness for nobody's benefit but your own.

Expand and Contract

Sympathy is a finite emotion. The vision of ever-expanding rings of sympathy, which the Stoics made much of in the ancient world and Peter Singer makes much of today, has no foundation in human nature. The attempt to force ourselves to feel sympathy for those who exist outside our natural range will not increase our humanity. In fact it will do just the opposite, because if we expend our compassion on people we never meet, we will tend conversely toward indifference in our actual interactions.

A Ton of Bricks

Why is it that writing in this age has to be full of bad metaphors in order to be considered good? Evidently something's own essence isn't enough. It has to be like something else, even if the comparison is ill-conceived.

A Local Act

It is the goal of our society to give us a sense of fear and awe before its ideals. How well does it succeed? Do you find yourself for instance, in your attempts to achieve local social acceptance, casually upholding and promoting the ideal of universal equality? If so, do you do it because you actually believe in it? Do you understand why? How intimate are you with your own inclinations?

Is There a Recipe for This?

The truth frequently means nothing to a human being until it has been interpreted in processed terms. As a result, the truth and its interpretation have often been mistaken for one another. “The truth is a social construct,” goes the familiar cry. This is close enough to being true to have become extremely influential; but the interpretation, not the truth itself, follows the social construct. The truth is raw, the interpretation processed. Those who propose to deconstruct the truth are doing no such thing. They are merely deconstructing the interpretation according to an assumed and of course rejected social recipe, whether it lies behind it or not, in order to promote their own preferred recipe in its place.