Sublime

This is asking more from politics than politics can deliver. Once politics becomes your ethnic or moral identity, it becomes impossible to compromise, because compromise becomes dishonor. Once politics becomes your identity, then every electoral contest is a struggle for existential survival, and everything is permitted. Tribalism threatens to take

A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird’s nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at

The whole thrust of modern thought has been toward reducing the sphere of individual moral responsibility.

People who are left naked and alone by radical individualism do what their genes and the ancient history of their species tell them to do: They revert to tribe. Individualism, taken too far, leads to tribalism. Hannah Arendt noticed the phenomenon decades ago. When she looked into the lives of people who had become political fanatics, she found two

Polar bears in nature will walk for miles across the Arctic tundra. They look for seal places, and they swim, and they eat seals. The exhibit [the cage where this polar bear was trapped] is nothing like real life. So, just like the guy in jail, they pace to appease the inner pain of being denied a real life…. They’ve got all these instincts that ar

Hermann Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel

A man can smile and smile and be a villain. Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain.