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The pathological tendency of the American spirit is to believe anything that makes it feel good.
The American left and the American right are illusions, ephemera, brands that hide a basic sameness in our political and social thought — a basic addiction to shallow, ahistorical reasoning consumed straight out of the corporate media can.
The symptom of a dying soul is its unquenchable desire for stimulation. Without meaningful work, without access to nature, without in many cases access to friendship and conviviality — without a whole life — people have nothing but time to sacrifice on the altar of ‘being entertained’.
The result is that people are reduced to basic feelings: fear and a jacked-up numbness.
Where are the artists of existence capable of creating new values and reviving lost virtues? You certain won’t find them in the institutional arts and humanities, whose sole focus seems to be advocating for the unrestricted distribution of puberty blockers to children and the slow cancellation of the entire western canon as racist.
We apologize or ironized anything too beautiful or numinous. There is a chatty, seminar-room like quality to all discussions of Real Presences — which we instinctively distance ourselves from.
It’s a category error: there is no category, anymore, for the ensouled; no way of describing the qualitative differences between the pleasant and the transcendent, between the classic and the painfully new.
We turn creative patterns of the profoundest value into inert things, objects of our semi-intelligent analysis.
I don’t mind if my life is circumscribed, but I do mind if my mind is circumscribed.
The news is mental rape. Stupid, callow, morally dead talkbots create circular arguments amongst themselves in the name of expert analysis.
The biosecurity state has replaced the national security state.
