Atheists in Space: “[Oswald] Spengler believed that even as the 20th century began, all of the theoretical edifices constructed by the West to replace its old sacred order — which mainly manifested as political ideologies — had failed. Beginning in the 21st century, he predicted, the grandchildren of the revolutionaries and the rationalists, adrift in a failing materialist culture, would begin to seek succour in another place entirely:
‘The age of theory is drawing to its end. The great systems of Liberalism and Socialism all arose between about 1750 and 1850 … Belief in programme was the mark and the glory of our grandfathers — in our grandsons it will be proof of provincialism. In its place is developing even now the seed of a new resigned piety, sprung from tortured conscience and spiritual hunger, whose task will be to found a new hither-side that looks for secrets instead of steel-bright concepts.’
Choose Your Hard — Practical Principles for the New Year: “During my tenure as a corporate trainer for Dale Carnegie training before the COVID pandemic, I was impressed by the expressed depth of Carnegie’s life advice. One of his principles in How to Stop Worrying and Start Living is to live in ‘day-tight compartments,’ which means focusing on the activities that arise in the temporal unit of the day and nothing else.”
Do You Dare Even Look? Forecast 2024: ” It’s not all going to fall apart at once — though an electromagnetic pulse attack could do it — and we’ve already been witnessing the slow decay of many supply lines and services that we Americans formerly took for granted, like, getting a certain car part you needed, or a doctor’s appointment in under two months, or an airplane flight that isn’t some kind of existential trauma. But in 2024, we’ll see noticeable failures of systems for providing the things we’re used to getting, which is being aggravated greatly by the flat-out incompetence of people employed at everything, anywhere. Surely, you’ve noticed.”
Everyone’s Existential Crisis: “Telling people whose reward circuits are being hacked to get off TikTok and go outside and make friends is like screaming at an oncoming hurricane. There is no going back.”
On Francisco Franco: “Franco is, and has been for decades, a cause célèbre among the global Left, seen as the devil incarnate for his successful war against Communist domination of Spain. To successfully delay, or worse, block, any Left attempt to establish their permanent rule, thereby revealing that history lacks a progressive direction, is the unforgivable sin.”
The Case for Coercive Christianity: “If you write Christian teaching and moral principles into law, so the argument goes, you would be imposing the faith onto people, denying their freedom to choose Christ, denying them an authentic faith. This, I would argue, is a misunderstanding of the Christian faith.”
The Cross and the Machine: “Whatever had got us here, it was clear where we were going: into a world in which industrial humanity has ravaged much of the wild earth, tamed the rest, and shaped all nature to its ends. The rebellion against God manifested itself in a rebellion against creation, against all nature, human and wild. We would remake Earth, down to the last nanoparticle, to suit our desires, which we now called ‘needs.’ Our new world would be globalized, uniform, interconnected, digitized, hyperreal, monitored, always-on. We were building a machine to replace God.”
Where the Wild Things Are — Existence is Hell: “So begins the human journey of damnations. Beautiful music about love won’t save the viewer from this pitch-black tunnel whose only light seems to be the promise of accepting sadness and violence as god. “