Home from another poker night where I can't tell if I've gotten really good at poker, or if I'm just getting lucky. Maybe that's the point; sometimes I just need to get lucky. I did not think about it. It's 2 a.m., but I have a lot of energy because I had a Red Bull and later a thing of orange juice, but no alcohol.
I have so much physical energy these days, so much more than I used to. In my 20s I barely slept. I was all over the place, didn't eat meat, and exercise was a long run. Now, in a sense, the way I treat my body is more dynamic: I do sprints, a little bit of weight-lifting, but I don't put on muscle. I get a lot of sleep—relatively. I eat meat, I eat sugar, all things which I cut out. As a weird consequence, I feel almost younger than I did when I was 20; I almost look younger.
In my 20s I was much more desperate than I'd like to admit.Not that I've got everything figured out now, hardly. I feel like I have some rational baseline. I know myself. I know how to feel my body and mind. I am basically what my standing is in the world. I was so worn out in my 20s because I was trying to make my life, and I think in some ways I almost killed that life. I really didn't sleep much certain years; I was kind of a delirious person.
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We actually have the technological means to better integrate city and country, to better integrate tradition and change, to better integrate commerce and stillness, entertainment and study, concrete and forest, lust and love, exploration and steadiness.
The novelistic, the dramatic truth of life is that most people are staggered by unmet desires and unexplored possibilities; lives are chopped up and mutilated, and at every level, in any order—the creative, the biological, the spiritual, the existential, the practical and social, the educational—there's some random gap, some point of pain. And civilization should orient itself to reducing that—because it can.
We have the resources, technologies; we have leisure: the time. But, somehow our resources, our drives, our creative collective visions do not build towards anything. And I don't mean this in a utopian sense: I mean that we don't use the tools we have at hand the right way; there’s waste instead of productivity and ferment. The future has been a misapplied. The creative reapplication of existing tools and existing nodes of wisdom and insight could lead to a startling increase in the richness, the variety, the depth of life if only…
I'm reading Christopher Lasch's The New Radicalism in America: The Intellectual as a Social Type, and I'm on the chapter—the best chapter so far—near the end, called "The New Republic and the War," about the New Republic magazine's disavowal of Teddy Roosevelt, its embrace of President Wilson, and its failure to really confront Wilson's many terrible mistakes: his bungling of the negotiations at Versailles, and the general transformation of America and American liberalism as a result of the country's entry into the war. I can't help but see certain parallels between the American liberal media establishment of 1917 and, say, 2022, by which point it was clear that Biden and COVID politics were something other than liberal—and that any liberal attempt to justify them would end up in mortifying contradiction.
Why can't good people admit to themselves they're doing bad things? It seems to me a problem of so much seemingly enlightened politics that intelligence—intellectualism, planning and idealizing, replace—virtue; sophistry starts to replace truth.
There cannot be bitterness if you are free enough to go lie in the sun.
I think the principal obligations of intellectual life are not to any political program but to intellectual life. Eventually that starts to breed its own micro-politics, which value the ecology of the mind.
Only the deepest ironist avoids, I think, in the long run, from getting lumped in with the useful idiots of history.
What do you need to live and think well? Respect for excellence, respect for limited achievable goals, respect for other people, and love for the people closest to you. It's always the human spirit versus totalitarian pressure, and so the beginning of any decent politics starts with and in yourself.
No self is easily coupled, naturally coupled, to the totalitarian, to the state, to the apparatus, to the command. You get revolutionary governments when people lose a discernible sense that they can change themselves, that they have any agency over their lives; that's how you get the despotism of the mob.
Everyone in a mob has redeployed their learned helplessness and their learned despair as the science of collective movement; in a mob, thousands of people who may have secretly wished to commit suicide have chosen instead to gather together at a mass killing machine; their helpless and loss of freedom is remastered as complete amoral collective freedom.
A rebellion is when individuals get together to overthrow a despotic system. A revolution is when they cease to be individuals, when individuals trade in their individuality and try to replace the system with their own zombie control mechanism.
No, institutions won't save us, but we might save ourselves.
I think one way to become wise is to smash seemingly mutually exclusive philosophies against each other and to search for previously unknown particles that show us how the underlying physics works.
There needs to be much less writing. I wish so many people would stop writing publicly. Why not write letters to your friends? Why not write in your journal? A platform is not a vocation. A vocation is a kind of beautiful sickness which forces you to speak or create; it isn't necessarily pleasurable or celebratory.