January 2026

Pilgrim’s Regress

By in books, extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy

From an interview with Daniel Kalder, whose Infernal Library is a hilarious book that you really should read.

I remember so many times in my younger days when I would pick up a book in a furious mood, having wasted energy on a pointless argument with someone who not only was impervious to evidence, but couldn’t even carry on a semblance of a rational debate. I read voraciously because I wanted to know. I wanted to challenge my own intuitions, and I wanted to understand the world as much as I could; I didn’t want to be one more complacent idiot, belching out vapid slogans and recycled Facebook rumors in lieu of knowledge.

One of the ironies I encountered along the way is that much of “wisdom,” to the extent that it can be reached, involves changing one’s mind and forgetting old “knowledge,” even more so than simply accumulating knowledge through reading. The more I pursued understanding, the less I could believe in the old ideal of building an impenetrable fortress of truth. I suspected I might even be going in circles, not getting anywhere in particular.

The final irony was realizing that even as I pursued personal progress in knowledge, the world as a whole was doing no such thing. Eventually you live long enough to see ideas come back into fashion, ideas which you thought “everybody knew” were wrong a few decades ago. But now you’re an old head, a living meme, and no one wants to hear what you think you’ve learned. And so the world goes on its cheerfully ignorant way, recycling one stupid, destructive idea after another.

All the Punks Still Singing the Same Songs

By in identity, the geist of the zeit, unintended consequences

In a new interview with The Times, Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) was asked about his thoughts on Bob Vylan’s chant, responding, “[It’s] sad and pointless. That’s just riding on the current wave of leftism, where you don’t have to think anymore. You just react with the herd. Moo!”

— Heavy Consequence

That would be the former frontman for the Sex Pistols, mocking today’s herd of independent minds. The trickster god, truly, he loves us and wants us to be amused.

A friend of mine grew up with punk and alternative and still plays contemporary versions on his radio show. When we listen to it, I can’t help silently thinking how safe, predictable, and boring it all is now. It’s become culture-war reenactment. Classic rock with a pink mohawk and a nose ring. The music, the politics, the moral emphases, the approved villains du jour — everything arrives in a neat bundle. You already know exactly what they think on the same narrow range of topics without having to ask. You can take it all in at a glance: rebellion that functions as a call-and-response, a membership ritual, a little communion wafer of approved outrage.

It’s especially funny when one of punk’s old high priests commits the unpardonable sin of…continuing to form his own opinions. The establishment, consisting of people desperately pretending they’re not the establishment, is scandalized as always. The heresy is refusing the mandatory chant, mocking the herd instinct, declining to treat slogans as thinking. Once a “rebellious” scene becomes an institution, it polices its borders like any institution: it starts confusing dissent with treason, and spontaneity with contamination. Poses held too long don’t stay poses. They ossify into statues.

There’s a tragedy in that arc, and it isn’t confined to punks who almost qualify for social security. A generation grew up believing that youthful attitudes and correct opinions would solve the world’s problems; then time did what time does, and they found themselves reluctantly in charge of a world with the same old problems. And so the costume gets worn long past the point of dignity, because without the costume there’s the blank fact of adulthood: maintenance, tradeoffs, partial victories, and the slow work of being responsible for something real. Meanwhile the next generation gets trained — ironically — less to think than to inherit the approved attitudes of their elders, like heirlooms.

Test the Smallest Thing

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche

All habituations (e.g., to a certain food, like coffee, or a certain timing) in the long run have the result of cultivating a certain kind of human being. Therefore look around you! Test the smallest thing! Where does it want to go? Does it belong to your kind, to your goal?

— Nietzsche, The Joyful Science / Idylls from Messina / Unpublished Fragments from the Period of The Joyful Science (Spring 1881–Summer 1882)

Another day, another viral video. Like a moth to a flame, someone else decides to blow up their life and career for a moment of attention on social media. I don’t believe most of these people sit down and choose ruin in cold blood. What they choose, over and over, in tiny doses, is something smaller: the little performance, the little outrage, the little “say the thing” that gets rewarded. Then one day the habit reaches its natural conclusion, and the person who hits “post” is already doomed.

Aristotle and Nietzsche agree on one blunt point: you become the kind of person you practice being. Aristotle says we become just (or not) by doing just acts (or not), until the repetition hardens into character. There’s something liberating about this. It loosens the superstitious grip of “That’s just how I am” and even “That’s what my upbringing made me.” But it also hands you the responsibility: if you can be formed, you can be reformed — and that means noticing which habits are shaping you into someone you don’t actually want to be. As Unamuno said, we should aim to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past.

Nietzsche’s advice is almost insultingly practical: test the smallest thing. Not your grand ideals; your reflexes. What do you do in the ten-second gaps? What do you reach for when you’re bored, or annoyed, or lonely, or pleased with yourself? Those are not neutral gestures. They’re the training regimen.

Take This Heavy Burden

By in ai, foolosophy, technology

Blair Effron:

There is little doubt A.I. will be transformative. And yet, for all the disruption it promises, I am struck by how much will remain unchanged. The most consequential decisions in business have never been about processing information faster or detecting patterns more efficiently. The most salient concerns are questions such as what kind of enterprise a firm should aspire to be, what culture it should embrace, what risks it should tolerate and how its leaders can plan when the path forward is unclear. These are questions of judgment, and judgment cannot be automated — at least not any time soon.

True. But it can be abdicated instantly, and there’s nothing people like more than handing off responsibility for judgment. They’ll love a machine that makes decisions feel inevitable. AI doesn’t replace judgment so much as provide a frictionless way to dodge it: the model recommends… and suddenly nobody is choosing, they’re “following the data.” If things go well, leadership “leveraged cutting-edge AI.” If things go badly, “the model was wrong.” Judgment won’t be automated. It will be subcontracted, with plausible deniability baked in.

Two Lüshi After a Snowstorm

By in poetry, seasonal

Snow, then sleet: the driveway seals itself.
Seventy yards of polished “no.”

I stand with a shovel like a steel amulet,
praying for traction, bargaining with time.

The neighbor arrives; the tractor lowers its blade—
a calm solution to my private drama.

I miss my old Impreza’s cheerful grip;
I miss, most of all, being ready.

****

Forecast says doom. It delivers eight inches,
plus a neat varnish of ice on top.

Seventy yards becomes a logic puzzle:
how to get to work without a miracle.

My neighbor owns the miracle (diesel).
He clears my drive; I pay in thanks.

All year I don’t need a tractor.
All winter I want one.

The Devil Take All the Imitators and Followers

By in books, nietzsche

My goal is not for everyone, nevertheless it is communicable, on account of similar humans as well as because those opposed will gain strength and pleasure from it to formulate their essence for themselves, too, and to realize it as working spirit. I want to help all who seek their model by showing how one seeks a model: and my greatest joy is encountering the individual models that do not resemble me. The devil take all the imitators and followers and panegyrists and admirers and devotees!

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

This might be easy to misread as mere hauteur: he’s “not for everyone,” he’s writing for “similar humans.” Lots of people say that and mean, “I’m for a better everyone.” Nietzsche is saying something stranger, and rarer: my aim is communicable without being recruiting. The point isn’t to gather admirers; the point is to create a kind of wake turbulence in which different types, sympathetic and hostile alike, clarify themselves. He would even prefer that those opposed to him will “gain strength and pleasure” from the encounter, because the opposition forces them to formulate their essence — to stop living on borrowed slogans and become, in his phrase, a “working spirit.” (That is: not a mere opinion-haver, but a stance that actually animates a life.) It’s a surprisingly big-picture, almost civic-minded ambition.

“The devil take all the imitators…” The disciple is the least interesting kind of agreement: it’s agreement that produces no new organism, only a photocopy. He’d rather be misunderstood by a live mind than perfectly understood by a dead one. This is why he’s so hard on evangelism. In The Will to Power he asks why idealists, the moment they find some “bizarre ideal,” feel compelled to propagandize for it, almost as if they have no right to it unless everyone else recognizes it too. The hipster and the conformist secretly shake hands. One asks the herd what to like; the other asks the herd what to like so he can like the opposite. Both are still crowd-directed.

Nietzsche’s better alternative isn’t “always be avant-garde.” That’s just a different uniform. The alternative is inner-directedness — liking what you like because it answers something real in your temperament, your needs, your curiosity, your sense of life. If it’s popular, fine. If it’s obscure, fine. If people join you, fine. If they don’t, also fine. The goal is not to found a sect of “Nietzscheans,” but to help people (including opponents) become more sharply themselves. He can sound almost Zen-master-ish — “go away ”— because he knows that the easiest way for a reader to evade the hard work is to turn the writer into an idol. The writer becomes a permission slip to stop thinking. He’d rather you take your own ideal as far as it will go, and then take heart, because others will fly even farther.

Your Own Personal Jesus

By in jesus tie-dyed for your sins, moralizing, religion

Peter Wehner:

Huge numbers of American fundamentalists and evangelicals—not just cultural Christians, but also those who faithfully attend church and Bible-study sessions and prayer gatherings—prefer the MAGA Jesus to the real Jesus. Few of them would say so explicitly, though, because the cognitive dissonance would be too unsettling. And so they have worked hard to construct rationalizations. It’s rather remarkable, really, to see tens of millions of Christians validate, to themselves and to one another, a political movement led by a malignant narcissist—who is driven by hate and bent on revenge, who mocks the dead, and who delights in inflicting pain on the powerless. The wreckage to the Christian faith is incalculable, yet most evangelicals will never break with him. They have invested too much of themselves and their identity in Trump and what he stands for.

The Gospels do not present a soft, therapeutic Jesus whose entire public mission is to validate the politics of educated suburban moms. You can assemble a “nice Jesus” out of carefully chosen lines — feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, forgive seventy times seven — just as you can assemble a “hard Jesus” out of other lines: “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword,” and the blunt demand that allegiance to him outrank even family and life itself. The text is not a simple moral pamphlet. If you want to recruit it as a partisan cudgel, you can.

And if you step outside the sermon and into history, the problem gets worse. A great deal of serious scholarship situates Jesus in the world of Jewish apocalyptic expectation: the sense that the end is near, judgment is coming, and everything is about to be overturned. In that context, the radical ethic is spoken from a very different time-horizon. The ethics of someone who thinks the apocalypse is nigh are not the ethics of someone trying to raise a family, pay a mortgage, keep a business afloat, care for aging parents, and make decisions under imperfect information for the next forty years.

Too much modern moralizing is childish. Most of our ethical disagreements aren’t because one side loves cruelty and the other side loves compassion. They’re because life forces us to juggle duties: generosity versus solvency, mercy versus safety, forgiveness versus deterrence, ideals versus consequences, the immediate relief of suffering versus the slow work of building institutions that don’t collapse under the weight of good intentions. Some stances are easier when you think tomorrow won’t come. Some forms of purity are only available to people who won’t have to live with the bill.

So no, there is no pure Christianity floating above politics, untouched by human desire. There never was. There is only the hard work we can’t escape: interpreting unclear information, weighing competing goods, choosing under uncertainty, revising in light of consequences, and doing it again next week. If you’re looking for a Jesus who saves you from judgment, who issues you a laminated, unambiguous policy sheet, you’re asking for the one thing the human condition doesn’t offer. No easy answers are coming to save us. The work is the point.

This Land Is My Land

By in writing

In the 1989 hillbilly-revenge movie Next of Kin, Briar Gates, played by Liam Neeson (I know; I was surprised too when I looked it up) is defending his scruffy patch of rural life: “This land’s mine!… I can go out and take a piss on it in the middle of the night if I want to!” That’s how I feel about my humble little blog-property. It may not be glamorous. It doesn’t have “creator tools” or “discovery” or a TV app. But it’s mine: I can piss post whatever I want, whenever I want, in whatever awkward, unfashionable format I want — and I don’t have to audition for an algorithm or comply with a platform’s latest reinvention of “community.” A blog is land; Substack is a nice apartment in someone else’s building. Now you’ve got journalists moving in to try to recreate their glory days, and it looks like the latest renaissance of blogging will have to pick up stakes and move on again.

See, this wouldn’t keep happening if you didn’t keep chasing after “engagement” and “relevance.” To paraphrase Lt. Ronald Speirs, “You went to Substack because you think there’s still hope. But the only hope you have is to accept the fact that you’re already irrelevant. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll be able to function as a blogger is supposed to function.”

The Chair Repair Republic

By in books, foolosophy, lin yutang

When a man gets frightened or unhappy about the United Nations or the problems of world peace, and wants to recover his happiness, the best thing to do is find some choked kitchen drain and try to clear it. There is hardly a man on earth who is not proud when he sees the water go down the sink smoothly with a clear gurgle as the result of his morning’s labor. Or, instead of committing suicide over the tragedy of Czechoslovakia, one should find out if there isn’t a shaky chair in the house and see if he can’t fix it and make it safe to sit on again. After all, one can save the future of Czechoslovakia only by saving oneself and keeping oneself happy and alive first. The sovereign remedy for world chaos seems to be to provide every household with a hammer and a monkey wrench and a plentiful supply of nails.

— Lin Yutang, The Best of an Old Friend

A man who can’t unclog a sink but is “following world events closely” is basically worshiping abstraction. He has outsourced his sense of agency to headlines. You could substitute Czechoslovakia with Gaza or Greenland, and world peace with ICE, and the lesson stays the same. If we’re realistic about our position in the world, most have us have no power, influence, or money to “change the world” with. As individuals, we can at best be a perfectly placed rivet in a skyscraper, and that doesn’t seem like much, but you might notice a dramatic difference if it weren’t there.

But even Lin’s point isn’t “don’t care about the world,” it’s “stop confusing agitation with agency.” World-scale crises can matter deeply and still be beyond your reach. If you let your nervous system live on a steady diet of catastrophe, you end up trading responsibility for spectacle and calling it virtue. The drain and the shaky chair are a kind of triage: they pull you back into a realm where cause and effect are real, where competence is measurable, and where you can actually keep yourself steady, functional, and sane. Attention isn’t power, and outrage isn’t influence; but a household, a neighborhood, a job done well, a person helped — these are places where your actions register. Get your own water running cleanly first, and you’ll be in a position to be the symbolic rivet you can realistically be, instead of the trembling spectator of events you can’t change.

Obiter Scripta, no. 152

By in books, nietzsche, obiter scripta

I have always composed my writings with my whole body and life: I do not know what “purely intellectual” problems are.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

Same here. When I write, I’m not filing papers in a cabinet labeled Ideas; I’m trying to metabolize experience into something I can understand. Often, I’m not even sure what I think until I start trying to write it down. Philosophy as “how to live” begins in the pressure of actual days and tries to make a life more lucid.

The Ideology Sprinklers

By in aphorisms, jests japes jokes jollies

This is one of the best aphorisms I’ve read in a while. It’s obviously the rule online, but even face-to-face, some conversations feel like walking across a lawn rigged with motion-sensor sprinklers. You’re trying to talk about the actual topic, you step on one innocent word, and — pshhhht — here comes the ideological spray. The baffling part is that the system doesn’t even seem aimed at meaning. It’s aimed at movement. With family members, I sometimes find myself standing there absorbing a spittle-mist, fumbling for the off switch like a homeowner in the dark — “Where’s the manual override? Where’s the shutoff valve?” — while the sprinklers keep faithfully doing what they were programmed to do on schedule.

Cultivate Our Temperament

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche

It is in our hands to cultivate our temperament like a garden. To plant experiences in it, to strike out others: to found a beautiful quiet avenue of friendship, to be conscious of secret views upon glory — to have ready paths to all these good spots in one’s garden so that it may not fail us when we need it!

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

I like that he envisions an active role in what most people treat as a given. Temperament not as a horoscope, but more like a landscape — worked, shaped, improved. You don’t have to deny what happened to you, but you also don’t have to treat it as your permanent job title. The modern temptation is to explain yourself until the explanation becomes the self: “My father was aloof, my mother was manipulative — therefore this is what I am.” That story may be true as history, even useful as diagnosis; but it’s a terrible constitution. It turns causes into fate. Nietzsche’s instinct is to demote the past from sovereign to raw material: what can I do with this? what can I plant? what can I prune? what paths should I keep clear so I can reach the good places when I’m under strain? Some experiences you cultivate because they make you steadier: friendships that calm you, habits that keep you sane, small “views” that restore perspective. Other experiences you strike out — not by pretending they never happened, but by refusing them unlimited squatter’s rights. And even the worst things are still compostable. They can become material that, once broken down, feeds something better.

Tomorrow Answers Everything

By in battling personal entropy, books, foolosophy, nietzsche

The unfortunate who all at once want to attain virtue through a transformation! And despair at a relapse! Whereas practice makes perfect.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

January is when my gym turns into a little Ellis Island of self-improvement. New faces. New vows. The staff gives tours to people interested in signing up. I’ve seen a fair amount of them these last few weeks.

I’m glad people are trying. I mean that. But I also start from a skeptical stance, because the whole thing is so heavily scripted. The cultural calendar has a “New Year, New Me” plotline built into it, and plots are hypnotic. They lend borrowed conviction. They make you feel like you’re already halfway changed, just because you’ve announced the intention to change.

I’m not proud of it, but January brings out my inner Snafu from The Pacific — the guy who tells Sledge not to bother learning the new replacements’ names because “they’ll be dead in a few days.” The gym translation is obviously less tragic: most of them won’t be dead, however much they feel like it after a few hard training sessions. They’ll just be gone by February, evaporated with the resolution-enthusiasm. And I hate that this cynical little reflex exists in me, because the decent response is the opposite: be friendly anyway, and help the ones who end up staying.

Transformation is a romance-novel word. It promises a before-and-after montage. It suggests that what you really need is not a new habit but a new identity — some sudden moral molt where you wake up and discover you have become the kind of person who loves broccoli and Bulgarian squats. Relapse, in the transformation story, isn’t “part of training.” It’s “proof you are who you always were.” One missed week becomes an existential referendum. The spell breaks, and the old self trudges back in. But relapse is only catastrophic if you were depending on feeling to do the work.

That’s why I trust the April or September sign-up more than the January sign-up — maybe irrationally. The April/September person doesn’t have a national chorus chanting behind them. No “fresh start” motivation. No holiday guilt. Just an ordinary Tuesday and a decision that doesn’t come prepackaged with fireworks. I could be wrong about this (the calendar is a convenient on-ramp, and I’m sure plenty of January people stick), but the vibe is different: April/September feels like someone quietly taking responsibility rather than auditioning for a reboot.

Motivation is what you have when the gym is new and the possibilities are infinite. Practice is what you build for the day when the gym is crowded, your sleep was trash, the parking lot is icy, your knees feel 10 years older, and your brain starts bargaining: You can go tomorrow. Tomorrow will be better. Practice is what happens when tomorrow comes and is not better.

Lennonism

By in atheism, religion

“Refuted.” I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Frankly, I don’t think either side has made a “novel” argument in forever, though if you’re concerned with truth over fashion, I don’t know why you’d care about novelty in any event. The only interesting thing to note here is the old double-standard. The most unsophisticated, uneducated professions of faith are always accepted as valid and genuine. The most simpleminded believer is accepted to have had some meaningful experience of the truth of God’s existence. A newly-minted faith, built on vibes, grief, longing, “I felt called,” a single sermon, a Chesterton quote, or one Lewis book — socially, that counts as real. No defenders of the faith would say, “You have no idea what you’re even agreeing to, you ignoramus. Come back when you’ve digested Augustine’s account of evil, Aquinas on act/potency, and Niebuhr on irony.” But doubt is treated like a procedural error: “You can’t possibly reject this unless you’ve read everything we’ve ever written to save it.” Suddenly you’re expected to defend a dissertation in patristics, scholasticism, and 20th-century theology before you’re allowed to have an equal opinion. It’s almost as if this is all nothing more than a social species attempting to achieve psychological security through enforced conformity.

Arguments are beside the point anyway. It’s largely a matter of temperament. At the thought of death, you’re either sin-haunted like Samuel Johnson or you’re placid and accepting like David Hume. Note, though, that Hume’s calm acceptance of death wasn’t threatened by the existence of people like Johnson worrying himself sick over what awaited him on the other side. Johnson, in contrast, can’t concede that the unbeliever might die in peace, because that would imply peace is possible without his particular terror and his particular cure:

(It must be acknowledged that it was undoubtedly clever of Johnson to ironically turn Hume’s own reasoning against the probability of miracles back upon him.)

In his notebooks, Camus wrote, “I often read that I’m an atheist and I hear people talk of my atheism. Yet such words mean nothing to me, they make no sense to me. I don’t believe in God and I’m not an atheist.” Likewise, I don’t believe in gods or immortal souls and I think that Reddit atheists and Twitter Christians deserve the hell of each other’s argumentative company. Maybe I’m just a Lennonist in the end: whatever gets you through the night is all right with me.

Obiter Scripta, no. 151

By in books, nietzsche, obiter scripta

Daily I am astonished: I do not know myself!

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

According to biographer Ernest Jones, Freud said that Nietzsche “had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live.” And yet, here we have it otherwise, straight from the horse-hugger’s mouth. More proof that Nietzsche was ahead of his time: he revealed Freud to be a charlatan even before the old bullshit artist’s career had begun.

“Know thyself” is the foundation stone of Western philosophy. You try to know yourself; you discover an impulse you didn’t authorize; you explain it; then you discover the explanation was also an impulse. At that point you begin to suspect that Delphi wasn’t offering guidance so much as taunting humanity with a red-dot laser pointer and watching us pounce on the wall for three thousand years.

Yippee Cahiers!

By in ai, books

For much of the past year, I’ve been making an effort to seek out more aphoristic, fragmentary, short-form writing. I want material that’s more suggestive than declarative, stuff that allows me to play off of it in my own writing. One recommendation that came up was Paul Valéry’s five-volume notebooks, Cahiers. In his book In a Cardboard Belt!, Joseph Epstein suggested that the first two volumes were “more literary and, in a distant sense of the word, personal” than the remaining three volumes, which were more scientific and philosophical, so I set my sights on those, and will let one of my aristocratic patrons secure the other three at some point.

Unfortunately, each volume is typically priced at eye-watering sums. Patrick Kurp confirmed that they are marvels and taunted me with the fact that he lives in civilization and thus can borrow them from the university library whenever he wants, but I, out in the sticks, couldn’t even secure an inter-library loan for them. I resigned myself to setting price alerts in hopes of pouncing upon a used copy accidentally listed for $10.00 instead of $100.00, but my hopes weren’t high.

Don’t listen to the anti-AI fanatics. ChatGPT found me copies from the University of Toronto Press for 60% off, which, with the conversion rate, amounts to them practically giving the books away for a song. It appears that they don’t ship directly to the States, but thanks to my contacts north of the border, I can work around that. I will not be denied!

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