… Geo-politics, taken alone and by itself, is brute force. An ideal, taken alone and by itself, is unreal. Might it not be the case that the reality of any cultural and civilizational ideal at the level of a nation state depends on its proper relation with the geo-political; and that this complex interdependency, indeed, is what makes possible a civilization’s ideal-real -- as opposed to its purely imaginary, or purely brutal – character?
Read More… Recent warnings from repentant social media entrepreneurs Chamath Palihapitiya and Sean Parker have done nothing but affirm Berdyaev’s observation, and the situation must now be far worse than he ever could have imagined. Such a dehumanized world, according to Berdyaev, “puts man under the sign of demonic possession and loss of balance.” As we have become all too aware, both capitalism and communism participate in this dehumanization, and no existent political structures offer an alternative. “The world threatens to become an organized and technicized chaos in which only the most terrible forms of idolatry and demon-worship can live.”
Read MoreI am a writer. I know how to construct stories. I know what makes them succeed or fail, and I have a nose for when a story does not hang together. The covid Narrative is just such a story. It doesn’t fit together, even on its own terms. Something is wrong. The surface tale does not reflect what lies beneath. And what lies beneath is what interests me now.
Read MoreA vaccine of this type is not, properly speaking, an alternative to lockdowns and restrictive measures; rather, it is the ideal instantiation of the anthropology underlying these very same lockdowns and allied restrictive measures. It is the most powerful weapon in modern medicine’s “war against the virus,” in the context of modern man’s “war against suffering and death.”
Read MoreScientism and technocracy constitute the water in which we swim, so much so that the possibility of framing human existence in any other way hardly comes to mind. Proof of this can be found in the fact that it is hardly imaginable to devise other ways than lockdowns and mass vaccinations to deal with the circumstance of an epidemic.
Read MoreThe contrast between the high level of thought reached by Kennedy during his American University speech and the banalities and lies so regularly uttered by American presidents ever since could hardly be more dramatic. What has happened? How did the quality of American thought and leadership decline in such precipitous fashion?
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