It has been a brutal week, amigos. Record-setting levels of work, and an employee out with Covid until Tuesday. So, while I stare vacantly into the middle distance, trying to remember what it was like when I was capable of stringing two thoughts together, I want to encourage you to read Ed West’s Substack if you aren’t doing so already. I know, everyone and their mother has a Substack these days, and I read quite a few of them, but Ed’s is the only one to which I am an actual paid subscriber, because I don’t want to limit myself to only the free posts. If that isn’t enough to get your clicky finger twitching, well, I have read all of his “banterous short history books” and enjoyed them as well. Hell, even his Twitter feed manages to be full of interesting, dare I say uplifting, content, like a lotus flower floating above the stagnant, stinking swamp of social media. He’s a good fellow with a quintessentially dry British sense of humor, so go check it out while I return to my catatonic trance.
Outis Niemand
About Outis Niemand
Posts by Outis Niemand:
The New Error
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I am persuaded that the sum of stupidity and folly in the world is at times constant. Far from rejoicing when I see an old error depart, I think of the new error which will come to take its place, and I wonder anxiously if it will not be more inconvenient or more dangerous than the first.
— Alan R. Pratt, The Dark Side
Unbanked
A deeper concern is what happens when private institutions like corporations, universities, and media exercise the same power without even the pretense of accountability. If the large financial institutions want to, they can act as gatekeepers to society and would be held accountable only by the market, to which they also hold the keys. Given that institutions are heavily dependent on each other, if the institutions that hold important positions in the global financial web decide to freeze someone out, they can do so with the push of a button. Worse yet, we can imagine a scenario in which a system of freeze-outs could be automated based on people’s credit scores, purchasing histories, political donation patterns, key words in social media postings, carbon footprints, or political activism. It’s not hard to imagine a situation in which a citizen of a democracy wakes up one day to find themselves unable to participate in the digital economy, where almost all financial transactions take place, due to an automated system which flags them as being undesirable in some way.
Corporations and government have always exercised tremendous power, of course. Government has a monopoly on the use of force, using the policing powers to enforce laws. Corporations have always exercised enormous power via market share, advertising, lobbying, and other financial instruments. But never before have they been able to lock ordinary citizens out of social participation with the flip of a switch.
This push-button tyranny is real, and it represents a greater abuse of power than any that has been exercised before within the boundaries of liberal democratic government. It is new, it is breathtaking, and it is very dangerous.
— Michael Young, “We Will Delete You”
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There is power in information, and progressives seek to use their political advantage in states such as New York and California to lean on technology firms to impose an Orwellian blackout on wrongthink — removing unpopular voices and views from social media, cutting off verboten institutions and communications from the digital infrastructure, and, if it comes to it, manipulating GPS services to simply erase unwelcome charities and businesses. If you ever were bewildered by the old Stalinist practice of airbrushing photos to remove figures who have fallen into disfavor, this is the same sensibility at work.
It is easy to see the kind of politics practiced by Letitia James et al. descending into any number of dystopian scenarios. If we are all using self-driving cars in 20 years, you can be sure that the Letitia Jameses of the future will try to control where those cars will go — and where they won’t. Progressives already have weaponized the financial system against their political enemies — here, again, Letitia James is a major offender — and you can be sure that in a cashless society they will simply try to exclude wrong-thinking businesses, if not entire wrong-thinking industries, from the system. (Sturm Ruger & Co. makes a legal — and excellent — product, but it has been unbanked three times because of left-wing political pressure.) And it is not as though weaponizing travel would be unprecedented: You already can have your passport taken away over a relatively small tax debt — even if the debt is the subject of an ongoing dispute.
The Internet was supposed to be a decentralizing power, but, in many cases, the rise of ubiquitous information technology has had a centralizing effect that must be guarded against and, where possible, counteracted — because it is liable to be exploited by those who believe that justice requires that their fellow citizens be something other than free.
— Kevin D. Williamson, “America on Parole“
Truth Could Be a Game That We Play
Does not civilized living depend on not seeing things as they are? There can be neither order nor stability and continuity without illusions about authority, about the attainability of desired goals, about the quality of our fellow men, and about our own nature. A confrontation with naked, raw reality shreds the fiber of civilized life.
— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath
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Even if we were mad enough to consider all our opinions true, we should still not want them alone to exist: I cannot see why it should be desirable that truth alone should rule and be omnipotent; it is enough for me that it should possess great power. But it must be able to struggle and have great opponents, and one must be able to find relief from it from time to time in untruth — otherwise, it will become boring, powerless and tasteless to us, and make us the same.
— Nietzsche, Daybreak
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The theme of this book is that, for better or worse, lying, untruth, is not an artificial, deviant, or dispensable feature of life. Nature engages in it, sometimes with remarkable ingenuity. Art, with its “telling of beautiful, untrue things,” has at times so dominated the mind of a period thinkers could seriously argue that life may be understood truthfully only in aesthetic terms. The impulse to transcend mere literal fact occurs throughout nature. Quite humble biological organisms evolve as a semblance, an alias; a pictorial rendering of some other, less vulnerable organism, Might we not say, for example, that species of Cycloptera, insects that resemble leaves, trompe d’oeil masterpieces which might have been painted by a seventeenth-century Dutch master, perfect in color, shape, and size, even complete with imitation veins and fungus spots, are works of art? It is a seductive hypothesis that falsehood is “on the side of life,” is the lubricant that makes society run, while truth can be harsh, dangerous, and destructive; too simple, too naked, for the complexities of twenty-first-century society, inheritor of one of the most brutal hundred years in the history of mankind.
— Jeremy Campbell, The Liar’s Tale: A History of Falsehood
Nescire Aude
The essayist is allowed to be familiar, with the understanding that familiarity differs crucially from being personal. What has changed in recent years, and not in the essay alone, is the new penchant among writers for the uncomfortably personal, chiefly residing in confession. The great essayists have also been great adepts of tact, with bone knowledge of precisely how much of themselves they should reveal, how much to hold back. They did not foist their sadnesses on their readers, did not feature their weaknesses. In contemporary writing, consummate tact has been replaced by constant confession. Contemporary writers, essayists among them, provide us with accounts of their sexual kinks, their addictions, their longings, the nightmares of their childhoods, their mental illnesses. Balzac called the artist, by which he meant chiefly the writer, a prince among men; today the prince has increasingly become a patient.
— Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits
Recently, the Man with the Chin of Gray and I were joking about our weariness with this sort of thing. I said that “I don’t want to know about it” would probably look pretty sharp translated into Latin, and that I might make that the motto of my family crest. Serendipitously, I happened to read this shortly thereafter in Benedict Beckeld’s Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations:
As the middle class increases its numbers in a civilization’s mature days, knowledge democratizes and theory grows popular. The illusion of reflection and profound thought spreads to all and sundry. With ubiquitous education and at least a smattering of theory for almost everyone, ever larger swathes of society will fall victim to the higher self-placement that tends to go hand in hand with oikophobia. We would therefore do well to turn the in some sense laudable Horatian dictum that Kant quotes in his essay What Is Enlightenment? (1784), namely sapere aude, “dare to know,” which leads to a cohort of busybodies believing that they can steer their societies teleologically by means of superficial knowledge, into an equally laudable nescire aude, “dare not to know,” dare to admit ignorance, dare to be open to doubt and to take yourself somewhat less seriously.
It’s not precisely the same implication, but I think it will suffice for my purposes. Dare to be intellectually humble, yes, but also dare to be intellectually discerning. Learn when to look away for the sake of dignity.
Obiter Scripta, no. 123
Where moderation is an error, indifference is a crime.
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books
Dictionary dot com’s Words of the Day for the past week have been: choice, dissent, draconian, autonomy, galvanize, and liberation. Is it really too much to ask to get an interesting, possibly unknown word delivered to my mailbox every morning — you know, just for fun — without it becoming yet another opportunity for political sermonizing? Boy, I really didn’t know what to think previously about complex topics like abortion or federalism, but now that the person in charge of the dictionary email listserv has oh-so-subtly made their point, I’m convinced!
Never Gonna Give You Up
It’s especially weird since the entire argument behind banning him was to limit the reach of his posts, but I’ve seen 15 different screencaps of his Hutchinson thing. Everyone wants to share it themselves. https://t.co/lncD0k4uY0
— Noam Blum (@neontaster) June 28, 2022
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Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Behold the Loaf
A positive thing about academic life is that it affords us the possibility of specialization. But this positive is at the same time also a negative, because the specialization of departments and the delimitation of knowledge mean that, when someone tries to understand an issue in an interdisciplinary, global way, it is in the very nature of academia to protest. Though I place this book within political philosophy and the philosophy of history, my analysis walks among many academic disciplines—philosophy, philology, history, sociology, political science. And when someone pays a visit to several departments, but then after a brief time leaves again in order to see the larger whole, it is almost inevitable that he will be accused of not being serious. An interdisciplinary approach will often, therefore, require a certain ruthlessness in tearing down, for at least a little while, the walls that keep neighboring areas apart. Members of the various departments will often resent encroachment on their turfs, since they spent so many years of hard labor to become initiates themselves.
— Benedict Beckeld, Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations
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The grey beards wag, the bald heads nod,
And gather thick as bees,
To talk electrons, gases, God,
Old nebulae, new fleas.
Each specialist, each dry-as-dust
And professorial oaf,
Holds up his little crumb of crust
And cries, “Behold the loaf!”
— Eden Phillpotts, “Miniature”
Do You Even Lift, Seneca?
Without philosophy the mind is sickly, and the body, too, though it may be very powerful, is strong only as that of a madman or a lunatic is strong. This, then, is the sort of health you should primarily cultivate; the other kind of health comes second, and will involve little effort, if you wish to be well physically. It is indeed foolish, my dear Lucilius, and very unsuitable for a cultivated man, to work hard over developing the muscles and broadening the shoulders and strengthening the lungs. For although your heavy feeding produce good results and your sinews grow solid, you can never be a match, either in strength or in weight, for a first-class bull. Besides, by overloading the body with food you strangle the soul and render it less active. Accordingly, limit the flesh as much as possible, and allow free play to the spirit.
— Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 15
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Physical strength is the most important thing in life. This is true whether we want it to be or not. As humanity has developed throughout history, physical strength has become less critical to our daily existence, but no less important to our lives. Our strength, more than any other thing we possess, still determines the quality and the quantity of our time here in these bodies. Whereas previously our physical strength determined how much food we ate and how warm and dry we stayed, it now merely determines how well we function in these new surroundings we have crafted for ourselves as our culture has accumulated. But we are still animals – our physical existence is, in the final analysis, the only one that actually matters. A weak man is not as happy as that same man would be if he were strong. This reality is offensive to some people who would like the intellectual or spiritual to take precedence. It is instructive to see what happens to these very people as their squat strength goes up.
— Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength
Movin’ On Up
I shook hands with a billionaire today. In a couple of weeks, we’ll have a meeting where he says I can, and I quote, “tell me what you need.” This is it, fellows. This is my chance to pitch someone on my lifelong dream of becoming an ornamental hermit. “Yes, sir, I’ve been thinking it over, and I’m going to need a grotto, a folly or two, a custom-built library…”
The Choice
The invention of printing has done more to change the content of the average man’s mind than anything else. That content is one of the most curious and terrifying phenomena of the modern age. We know too much and too little. We all have a mass of information and opinions on world-wide topics, from Hitler’s schizophrenia to Mussolini’s daughter, from the rise of Kemal Pasha to the proper breeding of turkeys. And yet we really know very little on these subjects. What’s in our minds resembles what’s in the town gossip’s, widened to cover the world. It is as if we were looking at a remote landscape through a field glass that brings just enough details to justify all sorts of exciting speculations. We are all suffering from a surfeit of undigested information, and all floating blissfully on the surface of imaginary, and rather undependable, borrowed opinions. Nobody knows anything any more. The more I read the more ignorant I become. The choice today before any educated man is between unread innocence and well-read ignorance.
— Lin Yutang, “500th Anniversary of Printing,” With Love and Irony
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Grant me, indulgent heaven, a rural seat,
Rather contemptible than great;
Where, though I taste life’s sweets, still I may be
Athirst for immortality.
I would have business, but exempt from strife;
A private, but an active, life;
A conscience bold, and punctual to his charge,;
My stock of health, or patience, large.
Some books I’d have, and some acquaintance too,
But very good, and very few.
Then (if one mortal two such grants may crave)
From silent life I’d steal into my grave.
— Nahum Tate, “The Choice”
I Started a Joke Which Started the Whole World Crying
For the past four days, several journalists at The Washington Post Montessori School have been doing the Twitter equivalent of hair-pulling, biting, kicking and scratching one another, which started when one of them did the Twitter equivalent of chuckling at a “problematic” joke. By way of comparison, on that same day, several of us at work were telling offensive and profane jokes about a guy we know who stands roughly three feet tall, and somehow we all got on with our lives. Forget education, income, and all those sociological markers; the real divide in the workplace is over humor.
Guess You’ll Die
I’m at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, where about 30 Amazon employees are staging a die-in during Amazon’s Pride Flag raising ceremony in protest of the company’s continued sale of what they say are transphobic books. pic.twitter.com/Pz0Pyy0Mzi
— Katherine Long (@_katya_long) June 1, 2022
For some odd reason, I often find myself these days remembering an anecdote about Bruce Lee:
Bruce had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run the three miles in twenty-one or twenty-two minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile. So this morning he said to me “We’re going to go five.” I said, “Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are, and I can’t do five.” He said, “When we get to three, we’ll shift gears and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.” I said “Okay, hell, I’ll go for it.” So we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m okay for three or four minutes, and then I really begin to give out. I’m tired, my heart’s pounding, I can’t go any more and so I say to him, “Bruce, if I run any more,” —and we’re still running—”if I run any more I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.” He said, “Then die.” It made me so mad that I went the full five miles.
— John Little, Bruce Lee: The Art of Expressing the Human Body
As Louis CK might say, of course we shouldn’t say something like that to those who use performative fragility as a form of manipulation. Of course not. But maybe…
Vigilant Gratitude
In fact, absurdity or irony must surely strike us as a distinctly misplaced and immature response. Why be absurd or ironic in any kind of unnaturally determined and sustained way about something that is precious and fragile and, above all, based on our best approximation of a central truth about our lives? A sense of vigilant gratitude would seem a more apt response, rooted in an honest and undeluded appreciation of the incorrigibly imperfect, frequently cruel, often wilfully destructive, yet infinitely unpredictable, occasionally exquisite and not entirely unhopeful world many of us still find ourselves occupying.
— Johnny Lyons, The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin
Today, I received a book which I ordered one week ago, on the 24th. I noticed when I checked the tracking information that it was being shipped from Johannesburg, South Africa. A couple of days after that, it passed through France, then England, before arriving stateside in Indianapolis. By Saturday, it was slightly north of here. Had it not been for the holiday, I might have even gotten it then, or on Monday.
Obviously, this was a routine transaction, one that we do all the time without thinking about it. Still, I think it’s worthwhile to reflect on just how great it is that we live in a world where it is both fast and affordable to discover the existence of a book, order a copy, and have it delivered to your door from halfway around the world. What would our great-grandparents have made of this?
The Best Social Philosophies
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The best social philosophies do not claim any greater objective than that the individual human beings living under such a regime shall have happy individual lives. If there are social philosophies which deny the happiness of the individual life as the final goal and aim of civilization, those philosophies are the product of a sick and unbalanced mind.
— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living
The Honest Naked Goddess Philosophy
In an age which suffers from this universal education, to what an unnatural, artificial and in any case unworthy state must the most truthful of all sciences, the honest naked goddess philosophy, be reduced! In such a world of compelled external uniformity it must remain the learned monologue of the solitary walker, the individual’s chance capture, the hidden secret of the chamber, or the harmless chatter of academic old men and children. No one dares venture to fulfill the philosophical law in himself, no one lives philosophically with that simple loyalty that constrained a man of antiquity to bear himself as a Stoic wherever he was, whatever he did, once he had affirmed his loyalty to the Stoa. All modern philosophizing is political and official, limited by governments, churches, academies, customs and the cowardice of men to the appearance of scholarship; it sighs ‘if only’ or knows ‘there once was’ and does nothing else.
— Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, ” Untimely Meditations
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It seems I am destined to become a market philosopher, but it can’t be helped. Philosophy generally seems to be the science of making simple things difficult to understand, but I can conceive of a philosophy which is the science of making difficult things simple. In spite of names like “materialism,” “humanism,” “transcendentalism,” “pluralism,” and all the other longwinded “isms,” I contend that these systems are no deeper than my own philosophy. Life after all is made up of eating and sleeping, of meeting and saying good-bye to friends, of reunions and farewell parties, of tears and laughter, of having a haircut once in two weeks, of watering a potted flower and watching one’s neighbor fall off his roof, and the dressing up of our notions concerning these simple phenomena of life in a kind of academic jargon is nothing but a trick to conceal either an extreme paucity or an extreme vagueness of ideas on the part of the university professors. Philosophy therefore has become a science by means of which we begin more and more to understand less and less about ourselves. What the philosophers have succeeded in is this: the more they talk about it, the more confused we become.
— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living