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Can there every be pleasure in thinking that is greater than the dumb pleasure of getting a notification — than some dumb bit of ‘news’ or an email or text or ‘like’? I doubt it. The obsession with meditation, with ‘headspace’, reveals how unmeditative, how cognitively muddled, dirty, we really are. All the tools that we use to clean up our cognitive lives — apps, meds, yoga — are really just cheap palliatives that allow us to feel more radical transformations of practice are unnecessary. Thus, the exercise of our cognitive faculties for anything more than momentary calculation — get more of X, less of Y, succeed more, succeed less—becomes impossible; meditation, in the sense of communion with, nourishing, and augmenting of the soul, becomes a lost art. Culture creates what it values, values what it creates — and this logical circle cuts off any oxygen from the brain. Letting anyone, or anything, think for you — a professor, a Facebook post, a pundit, a statistic — is a sin against the intellect. There no one more dangerously stupid than the urban liberal with an M.A. and a comfortable job who condescends to the Satanic “Trump Voter” back home in Alabama who watches Fox News; the difference between the M.A. and the Trump voter is just the difference between Id and Ego (or anus and mouth). The successful meritocrat loves the institutions which raised him up to a nice eco-friendly condo just outside the city; his best friend from childhood stayed at home, works in an Amazon warehouse, watches football religiously on Sundays, and secretly hates the institutions which ignored him and helped his friend. Again: these…
