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From the Notebooks

“Our lives as philosophers cannot be radically divorced from what we do when we are not doing philosophy.” Gerard Casey.

Indeed, I have heard the same thing said about theologians: theologians must be saints.

Nassim Taleb makes a similar point in Antifragile when he writes, “Never listen to a leftist who does not give away his fortune or does not live the exact lifestyle he wants others to follow. . . . It is not too different from the womanizing popes, such as John XII, or the Borgias.”

“Saints,” Taleb points out in the same passage, “have soul in their game.”

Amen to that. Quite frankly, if you don't have your own house in order, you have no business suggesting, much less requiring, people to put their own house in order or how to go about doing it.

If our voting electorate applied such premises to their elected representatives, our country would leap forward in virtue. It's fitting that the NFL be filled with reprobates and criminals. It is, after all, a game of violence. But for our statesmen to be rogues, such as the rogues that fill the Congress? Truly disturbing.

Unless, of course, government action is violence, in which case it'd made sense that rogues run the government, just as rogues run the football field.

And there, I fear, we really put our finger on the crux of today's political problem. Government has grown to a size that makes everything it does tinged with the touch of violence, with the result that we just expect rogues to run that field.

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