Hypervigilance: “The ability to quickly metabolize experiences and then let them go is a key marker of a healthy mind and body. By embracing the sensation an experience triggers, you let the body have a natural, healthy reaction. A good example is getting into cold water: The shock, the shaking, the tremors can feel too much but if you then tense more against them, the entire experience will be extra miserable. Instead, allowing everything to happen will make your body feel less vulnerable and safer.”
Love, Jesus, Plato, and Hegel: “…when we reject God, we still experience His love, but also the attendant anguish with our distance from Him. The flashes of salvation we experience on earth are when, in rare instances, we may experience His presence directly through His love. So, conversely, is God pained when we reject Him, and overjoyed when we embrace Him in love.”
Radically Chic Political Violence: “…the terrorism is forgotten because the terrorists of the late 60s and early 70s were victorious. As social psychologist Keith Campbell observed in a recent substack post, ‘They don’t show much of the violence of those decades in movies because the violent side won – some even became professors.'”
The Fourth Turning: “We are fracturing. We theoretically global face war, a monetary reset, and the collapse of the old order within the next five years. The good news is that these cycles keep on turning and we are most of the way through this one. After the chaos, there is theoretically a new social order, higher social trust, and real economic and cultural growth—maybe even a debt jubilee. The 1950s were the calm after World War II. If we survive this turning, the next era could be one of stability and strength. But right now, unfortunately, I think there is no stopping this crazy train.”
The Memory Hole: “The acceleration of information destroys memory. In 2006, Paul Virilio wrote in Speed and Politics that when power shifts from ‘knowledge-power’ to ‘moving-power,’ the time for deliberation vanishes. His concept of ‘dromology’—the logic of speed—predicted that acceleration would make everything simultaneous, destroying the ability to distinguish between what happened and what’s happening. Consider: In 2012, Eric Holder became the first sitting cabinet member held in criminal contempt of Congress over Operation Fast and Furious, an ATF operation that let 2,000 guns walk to Mexican cartels, resulting in the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. The story dominated headlines briefly, then vanished. Today, few remember that those guns were found at over 150 crime scenes where Mexican citizens were killed.”
The New Political Religion — and How to Fight It: “The challenge posed by modern political religion must be not merely resisted but answered. What is needed is not a counter-ideology but an act of anamnesis, a deliberate recollection of the foundations of order. The crisis of the West is a crisis of the soul, a loss of attunement to being, and the needed reordering must be personal as well as programmatic. The arduous work of rediscovering the order of the soul must constrain any sound order of the city, anchoring politics in a difficult contemplation of the good. Such a new founding calls for more than critique; it requires an Aeneas of a new world, a founder capable of bearing the West’s surviving patrimony out of the ruins and inaugurating social technologies conducive to building. To confront the new religion, we must re-engage the old philosophy and prepare for a new beginning.”