More Snoring, Less Beltway Whoring
The Hemisphere Hypothesis won’t teach you how to wrench a lug nut off a busted tire and it won’t tell you how to deal with the beard in your daughter’s locker room. It’s a theory, not a socket set or a crowbar. And for all its highfalutin talk about brain wiring and reality, it’s about as useful as a paper towel in a hurricane when you’re staring down the barrel of practical problems.
That’s the complaint, anyway . . . from the left hemisphere.
But only a left-hemisphere drunk on its own logic could look at the mess we’re in—economic Ponzi schemes, cultural decay, trannies in the girls’ showers—and declare as irrelevant a theory about how we think.
The Hemisphere Hypothesis ain’t about torque specs or locker room policies. It’s about how you carry yourself when the rubber’s flat and the world’s gone sideways. It’s about reframing the blown tire as something other than a personal affront from the universe. It’s about navigating the daily shitstorm of modernity—traffic jams, woke commissars, and all—without losing your mind.
I scribble about this stuff at Flourishing Despite Modernity, where I use the Hemisphere Hypothesis to make sense of how to live well in a world that’s forgotten how to live at all.
Now, that locker room situation? The Hemisphere Hypothesis gets murkier there. It’s one thing to philosophize about right-hemipsheric calm in the face of chaos, but when you’ve got a cultural revolution strutting through the showers, backed by sanctimonious bureaucrats from here to D.C., you’re not exactly pondering hemispheric balance. You’re wondering how we got to a point where common sense got kicked to the curb and replaced with a clown show.
Snoring Through the Apocalypse
Let’s talk about Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian general who sent Napoleon packing with his tail between his legs.
How’d he do it?
By napping, mostly. Snoring through strategy sessions, doodling on his personal whims while everyone else was screaming for action. In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Kutuzov’s genius was in knowing something bigger than his own ego was at play, some deeper current of fate or nature or whatever you want to call it. He didn’t meddle. He didn’t micromanage. He let the world turn and trusted it would grind Napoleon’s grand army into dust.
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Eric Scheske
