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Existence Strikes Back Part II

The Great Rejection Modernity rejected the Tao portion of the Reality Spectrum and focused almost exclusively on the “essence” part of the Reality Spectrum: things we can count, measure, and understand through reason and logic. This rejection of the Tao is the "Great Rejection.”

Montaigne: Smiling Skeptic

Montaigne spat on every dogma and system that strutted through the intellectual barnyard of his day. His motto: Que sais-je? (What do I know?) His answer, delivered with a smirk: Not a daggone thing. “There is a plague on man: his opinion that he knows something.” Montaigne Logic? Pfft. He’

A Meditation on Gnosticism Over at Substack This Morning

The guy who demands that everyone be rational becomes the most irrational of all. That’s an old Taoist zinger. It rang true when Lao-Tzu swayed atop his water buffalo to the misty hills of eternity; it’s true today as we clatter along in our mechanical Jacobins, guillotinely crisp

The Pilgrim Plague

Ah, the elite progressive white people. Those insufferable, self-righteous bastards who've managed to infect the American psyche with their millenarian madness for centuries. It's a flippin’ disease, a gnostic virus that's been festering in our national bloodstream since the first Puritan set his sanctimonious

Introducing Blaise Pascal: The First Anti-Modern

If we’re going to battle against modernity, we need to recognize our champions. Pascal might have been the first.

Black Magic and Scientism

Magic has fascinated me since I learned that the high watermark of magic was the Renaissance. The cutting-edge Renaissance thinkers were magicians. Magic and science were intertwined, its practitioners flitting between the two practices (arts) in their attempt to understand and, ultimately, control/manipulate the world, unaware that they are

Science and Magic . . . And Math

This is a great historical tie into Part II of Existence Strikes Back and its observation that modernity's momentum began to build in the 13th century, as Western civilization's capacity for control increased. Magic and science were twins in the cradle of modernity. This essay points

Trying to Figure Out How We Got Into These Rationalist Cocoons

And the cocoons' severe limitations

The Self-Destructive Effects of Progressive Sadness

David Brooks at the New York Times

Conservatives and the Culture

Claes Ryn, from Catholic University. A collection of his essays have just been published. The collection appears largely to recount the problem that conservatives have long been aware of: they abandoned the cultural field to the enemy. Shortly after World War II (others might date it back to 1900; others,

How to Brand Yourself Today

Pick Four Traits. One of Them Must be “Victim”