On existential dread

 From Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life by Agnes Callard

At around age fifty, the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910) experienced his life unraveling. He reports:

My life came to a halt. I could breathe, eat, drink, sleep and I couldn't not breathe, eat, drink, sleep; but I had no life because I had no desires in the fulfillment of which I might find any meaning.

The author notes and Tolstoy himself recognized that at the time Tolstoy had achieved everything that we would typically expect someone would require to thrive, flourish, and be happy (he had written two of world history's greatest novels, was in perfect health, wealthy, and had a family; yet Tolstoy still could not find meaning it it (to the point he considered suicide.)

In one sense it's alarming that if Tolstoy couldn't find happiness, what hope do the rest of us have with our everyday lives, but in another sense it's reassuring: the search for meaning is a human universal, a struggle we all face.

I've only read a little of this book as I had downloaded a sample, but the example of Tolstoy is given to set the stage for Socrates: someone who found meaning in the search for meaning. I'll definitely be reading the rest of this.

More on Orange Nero's lack of self-confidence

I wrote in August of last year that while Trump is arrogant, he has no confidence in himself: "My conception of confidence is Stoic: it is inwardly focused self-awareness that can not be affected by external circumstances. Trump does not have this: he has arrogance (false confidence) - and much of it." Today Paul Campos has written a post that expresses similar sentiment:

Of all the very many disturbing things about Trump, the single most disturbing to me is that he might actually be more emotionally than intellectually disabled. He’s genuinely desperate to win the Nobel Peace Prize that went to a Venezuelan woman (DEI!) this morning, because the essence of a narcissistic void is that the pseudo-person that inhabits it is utterly incapable of feeling any sense of internal validation or self-worth. Trump NEEDS this prize, and all the other prizes, including the Michigan Man of the Year Award for example, because his internal sense of self-worth is utterly non-existent. An even minimally well adjusted and liminally mature adult realizes at least on some level some of the time that prizes and fame and worldly success are transitory illusions, that all is vanity, that suffering is caused by desire, and so forth.

Obviously the sort of person who wins all the prizes, accumulates Smaug-like hordes of wealth, is named president of this and chairman of that etc, is not likely to spend much time contemplating that everything is dust in the wind, and that success walks hand in hand with failure along Hollywood Boulevard.

Quote of the day

 "A man ... shouts hoarsely at the soldiers, take off your masks, what have you got to hide?" - Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

This book was released in 2023, set in Ireland by an Irish author obviously in touch with the global backlash against democracy. Two years later and we have American secret police behaving like the villains in a fictional account of a country's decent into authoritarian repression.

Quote of the day

 "Your past joys and sorrows are like drawings on water: No trace of them remains! Don't run after them!" - Tokmé Zangpo

Via The Daily Buddhist: 366 Days of Wisdom for Happiness, Inner Freedom, and Mindful Living by Pema Sherpa & Brendan Barca

Feeling too close to home

 "The state is supposed to leave you alone, Michael, not enter your house like an ogre, take a father into its fist and gobble him, how can I even begin to explain this to the kids, that the state they live in has become a monster. All this will blow over, Eilish, the NAP will have to back down sooner or later, there is outrage all over Europe - Then why is the GNSB arresting more and more people each day, Michael, calling this a time of national emergency ..." - Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

It's difficult reading this 2023 book of dystopian fiction about the fall of Ireland to an authoritarian government. Difficult because it feels to familiar, too real now that masked secret police and paramilitary federal US forces are roaming the streets terrorizing people and abrogating the Fourth Amendment, (among others;) along with the US shadow president using fascist rhetoric that almost directly parallels Nazi propaganda to demonize his political opposition. I've even had a nearly identical conversation to the one above: where I say how horrible things are and someone tells me people are outraged and this will end and yet it keeps getting worse and more US cities are occupied by an oppressive force not of foreign invaders but ourselves. 

Quote of the day

"Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains." - Dorothy Thompson, "Who Goes Nazi?" (August 1941)

So she predicted Stephen Miller.

The most powerful part of Thompson's essay, the part that speaks to me the most, is where she describes an emigre being more American than the Americans who don't think he's an American: 

The people in the room think he is not an American, but he is more American than almost any of them. He has discovered America and his spirit is the spirit of the pioneers. He is furious with America because it does not realize its strength and beauty and power. 

My political hero Thomas Paine emigrated from England but upon landing on American shores became the loudest voice advocating for American independence, inspiring the Declaration of Independence, because his spirit and democratic ideals were  proto-American, more enthusiastically so than much of the population that had lived their whole life in the colonies and been there for generations. Another great American patriot - Frederick Douglass - was more American than the Americans who didn't merely see him as not an American but as less than human. 

And in this current moment, the tyrants who persecute because they feel they are blood and soil Americans defending the "homeland" from imaginary enemies are less American than the people they are persecuting. 

No, the masked secret police demanding to see people's papers and/or disappearing them for the crime of being not-white in public are traitors to the American ideals they claim to protect.