Karl Jaspers:

The technical life-order which came into being for the supply of the needs of the masses did at the outset preserve these real worlds of human creatures, by furnishing them with commodities. But when at length the time arrived when nothing in the individual’s immediate and real environing world was any longer made, shaped, or fashioned by that individual for his own purposes; when everything that came, came merely as the gratification of momentary need, to be used up and cast aside; when the very dwelling-place was machine-made, when the environment had become despiritualised, when the day’s work grew sufficient to itself and ceased to be built up into a constituent of the worker’s life—then man was, as it were, bereft of his world. Cast adrift in this way, lacking all sense of historical continuity with past or future, man cannot remain man. The universalisation of the life-order threatens to reduce the life of the real man in a real world to mere functioning.

But man as individual refuses to allow himself to be absorbed into a life-order which would only leave him in being as a function for the maintenance of the whole. True, he can live in the apparatus with the aid of a thousand relationships on which he is dependent and in which he collaborates; but since he has become a mere replaceable cog in a wheelwork regardless of his individuality, he rebels if there is no other way in which he can manifest his selfhood.

If, however, he wants to be himself, if he craves for self-expression, there promptly arises a tension between his self-preservative impulse, on the one hand, and his real selfhood, on the other. Immediate self-will is what primarily moves him, for he is animated by a blind desire for the advantages attendant on making good in the struggle for life. Yet the urge to self-expression drives him into incalculable hazards which may render his means of livelihood perilously insecure. Under stress of these two conflicting impulses he may act in ways which will interfere with the tranquil and stable functioning of the life-order. Consequently the disturbance of the life-order has its permanent antinomy in a twofold possibility. Inasmuch as self-will provides the space wherein selfhood can realise itself as existence, the former is as it were the body of the latter, and may drag the latter down to ruin or (in favourable circumstances) bring it to fruition.

If, then, self-will and existence both seek a world for themselves, they come into conflict with the universal life-order. But this, in its turn, strives to gain mastery over the powers which are threatening its frontiers. It is, therefore, profoundly concerned about matters which are not directly contributory to the self-preservative impulse. This latter, which can be indifferently regarded as a vital need for obtaining the necessaries of life and as an existential absolute, may be termed the ‘non-rational.’ When thus negatively conceived, it is degraded to a being of the second order: but it is either promoted once more to the first rank within certain restricted provinces; in contrast with purely rational aims, it may acquire a positive interest, as in love, adventure, sport, and play. Or it may be resisted as undesirable, this being what we see in those who are affected with a dread of life or a lack of joy in work. Thus in one or other of these ways it is diverted into the decisively and exclusively vital field—to the denial of the claim to existence slumbering within it. The powers interested in the functioning of the apparatus, in the paralysing of the masses, in the individual mind, seek to further the demands of the self-preservative impulse as a non-committal gratification, and to deprive it of its possible absoluteness. By rationalising the non-rational, in order to re-establish it as a kind of gratification of elementary needs, the attempt is made to achieve that which is not genuinely possible. The result is that what was originally fostered as something other than it is, is destroyed by what seems to be an endeavour to care for it. A prey to technical domi-nance, it assumes a grey tint or a crude motley colora-tion, wherein man no longer recognises himself, being robbed of his individuality as a human creature. Yet, since it is uncontrollable, it rides rough-shod over the ordinances formulated to destroy it.

Erin Plunkett:

“Political,” in Patočka’s thought, means caring for the polis, tending to the conditions that make life in common possible. These conditions are not political in the ordinary sense of the word but have to do with caring for that part of ourselves (and our neighbours) that cries out for truth, for meaning—in short, care for the soul. This is why, for Patočka, the life in truth is a political life: it is forged in times of uncertainty, when assumptions about the nature of what is and what is possible come undone, so that the question of what we want our lives to be like is raised anew, or perhaps for the first time. One begins wandering. A community is formed within this activity of unsettlement: the “solidarity of the shaken.” In this account, the foundation of political life and solidarity with others is not identity, of whatever kind, not the natural affinity we feel toward people like us, not the securing of rights, nor rational self-interest, but a shared experience of crying out for meaning and refusing easy answers. 

Tommy Dixon:

One of the reasons I like reading old letters and diaries is that people censor themselves less than if they were writing to an audience. They are not trying to sound impressive or worrying whether their thoughts are interesting, but rather writing clear and hard about what they want to say. Using plain language to put their mind, as it is, on the page. In a strange way, this often makes for good writing. The lack of rhythm becomes its own kind of rhythm, the casualness creating a sense of comfort.

David Dark:

In exchanges with friends and family and alleged students, I often find it challenging to get folks to reflect harder before speaking as if “the left” or “maga” or “the right” or “the media” are a person doing things. It is not possible to rightly quote an abstraction, but it is catastrophically easy to attribute words and motives and actions to one and then, like magic, imagine that a real and living someone said something that they did not in fact say. It seems to me that, at our healthiest, we take it one person at a time, getting really specific over who said and did what and when, and thereby avoid succumbing to hot generalization in our imaginings and our speech. Unexamined generalization generates heat without light. Generalization is fascism’s oxygen supply. Specificity cuts it off. […]

…most Americans and most human beings can distinguish between fear and love and behave beautifully. It starts, I think, with feeling and seeing and speaking and acting with precision and specificity, with wanting to know what’s true. Be specific. We have work to do.

Karl Jaspers:

More urgent than ever has become the problem concerning the present situation of mankind as the upshot of past developments and in view of the possibilities of the future. On the one hand we see possibilities of decay and destruction, and on the other hand we see possibilities that a truly human life is now about to begin, but as between these conflicting alternatives, the prospect is obscure. […]

The guiding principles of western mankind are incompatible with the notion that a mere circular recurrence can be stable. Our reason tells us that every new cognition implies further possibilities. Reality does not exist as such, but has to be grasped by a cognition which is an active seizure. From decade to decade the rapidity of the relevant movements has increased. No longer is anything fixed. All things are put to the question and as far as possible transformed[…]

Since I cognise the epoch through my cognition of the whole, or regard the cognition of the epoch as a desirable aim, I am confidently opposed to those who repudiate the demands of the epoch as I cognise it. To me they seem renegades, shirkers, defeatists, deserters from the cause of reality. They are traitors who have hauled down the flag!

Of course one who thinks in this way cannot escape the dread of being, after all, untimely, unseasonable. He watches anxiously lest he should be left behind, afraid that, while reality continues its steady march, he may fall out of step. The supreme question, therefore, is, what ‘the time demands’. How delightful to be able to declare this, that, or the other to be pre-Kantian, old-fashioned, pre-war! With such phrases, a doom is sealed. Enough to say reproachfully: ‘You are behind the times; you are out of touch with realities; you fail to understand the new generation!’ Only the new is the true; youth alone stands in the foremost front of time. Be up-to-date at any cost! Such an impulse towards contemporary self-assertion culminates in a trumpeting of the present, a glorification of the passing show—as if there could be no shadow of a doubt as to what the present really is.

Geoff Dyer:

Finally, in Camus, who made the most immense journey from his origins, I found someone who stated, in the most affirmative and human terms, the ways in which he remained dependent on them. This understanding did not come painlessly but eventually, in a sentiment that is wholly alien to the likes of Osborne, he achieved “something priceless: a heart free of bitterness.”

That is why I came here [Algiers]: to claim kin with him, to be guided by him.

I walk toward the sea and never quite come to it. Always you are separated from the sea by an expanse of one thing or another: docks or roads. No trace of the plage de l’Arsenal where Camus glimpsed for the first time the beauty of the Mediterranean. Now there are only the all-consuming docks. Gradually the sky becomes stained with clouds. The call to prayer comes over a loudspeaker, distorted and mechanical, like a factory whistle ordering the next shift to work.

Eventually I come to a stretch of land—I don’t know what else to call it—by the sea. It is not part of the port but, although the sea laps against an area of sand, it is not a beach. This is sand in the building-site sense of the word. There is rubble and rubbish everywhere. Rush-hour clouds are queuing across the sky.

Matthew Arnold, staring out at the Channel, thought of Sophocles and the sea of faith that had since receded. I think of Camus and the beauty that each year is pushed further and further out into the oil-filmed sea. As the waves lap in I detect a note of weariness in the endlessly repeated motion. Perhaps the sea never crashed vigorously here but it is difficult not to think some vital force has been sucked from it.

Camus concludes his famous study of absurdity by saying we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Easier to imagine him here, thinking “Is it worth it?” for if he rolled his rock up this slope he would come to a heap of rubbish—and when it rolled back it would end up in another even bigger heap. Easier to imagine Sisyphus looking forward to the cigarette that will make his lungs heave under the effort of work and which, when he has tossed away the butt, will add to the rubbish below. But perhaps there is consolation even in this: the higher the mound of rubbish the less distance to heave his rock—until there is no hill to climb, just a level expanse of trash. This is progress.

As I continue walking the sun bursts out again, making the bank of cloud smolder green-black, luminous over the sea. Perched be-tween the road and the sea, between sun and cloud, some boys are playing football in a prairie blaze of light. The pitch glows the color of rust. The ball is kicked high and all the potential of these young lives is concentrated on it. As the ball hangs there, moon-white against the wall of cloud, everything in the world seems briefly up for grabs and I am seized by two contradictory feelings: there is so much beauty in the world it is incredible that we are ever miserable for a moment; there is so much shit in the world that it is incredible we are ever happy for a moment.

René Girard:

Modern interpreters certainly see that everything in the Kingdom of God comes down to the project of ridding men of violence. But because they conceive of violence in the wrong way, they do not appreciate the rigorous objectivity of the methods which Jesus advocates. …

… Jesus invites all men to devote themselves to the project of getting rid of violence, a project conceived with reference to the true nature of violence, taking into account the illusions it fosters, the methods by which it gains ground, and all the laws that we have verified over the course of these discussions.

Violence is the enslavement of a pervasive lie; it imposes upon men a falsified vision not only of God but also of everything else. And that is indeed why it is a closed kingdom. Escaping from violence is escaping from this kingdom into another kingdom, whose existence the majority of people do not even suspect. This is the Kingdom of love, which is also the domain of the true God, the Father of Jesus, of whom the prisoners of violence cannot even conceive.

To leave violence behind, it is necessary to give up the idea of retribution; it is therefore necessary to give up forms of conduct that have always seemed to be natural and legitimate. For example, we think it quite fair to respond to good dealings with good dealings, and to evil dealings with evil, but this is precisely what all the communities on the planet have always done, with familiar results. People imagine that to escape from violence it is sufficient to give up any kind of violent initiative, but since no one in fact thinks of himself as taking this initiative—since all violence has a mimetic character, and derives or can be thought to derive from a first violence that is always perceived as originating with the opponent—this act of renunciation is no more than a sham, and cannot bring about any kind of change at all. Violence is always perceived as being a legitimate reprisal or even self-defence. So what must be given up is the right to reprisals and even the right to what passes, in a number of cases, for legitimate defence. Since the violence is mimetic, and no one ever feels responsible for triggering it initially, only by an unconditional renunciation can we arrive at the desired result:

And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return (Luke 6, 33-35).

If we interpret the gospel doctrine in the light of our own observations about violence, we can see that it explains, in the most clear and concise fashion, all that people must do in order to break with the circularity of closed societies, whether they be tribal, national, philosophical or religious. There is nothing missing and there is no superfluous detail. This doctrine is completely realistic. It envisages perfectly all that is implied in going beyond the ‘metaphysical closure’, and it never falls into the associated errors of modern fanaticism, which misunderstands the ambiguity and the ubiquity of violence, and invariably limits its indictment either to the loss of sacrificial order or to the presence of that order, either to unruliness alone or to rules alone, in the belief that to triumph over violence is simply a matter of violently eliminating one or other—either by curbing individual impulses or by taking the opposite path and ‘liberating’ them in the expectation that this act will establish peace in our time.

Because they have no knowledge of violence and the role that it plays in human life, these commentators sometimes imagine that the Gospels preach a sort of natural morality that men, being naturally good, would respect of their own accord if there were no ‘wicked’ people to prevent them from doing so, and sometimes they imagine that the Kingdom of God is a kind of Utopia, a dream of perfection invented by some gentle dreamer who was incapable of understanding the ground rules upon which humankind has always operated.

No one can see that the true nature of violence is deduced with implacable logic, from the simple and single rule of the Kingdom. No one can see that disobeying or obeying this rule gives rise to two kingdoms which cannot communicate with one another, since they are separated by a real abyss. Mankind can cross this abyss, but to do so all men together should adopt the single rule of the Kingdom of God.

Nick Cattogio:

And it’s a consolation to imagine that something like this could hurt Trump. If you find it hard to cope with what the United States has become, you might understandably retreat into nostalgic fantasy about Americans holding a politician’s sexually suggestive correspondence to the most infamous pervert in American history against him.…

Weak consolation. He quotes Andrew Egger:

In a way, Donald Trump and his allies have spent their entire political lives preparing for this moment. The whole miserable decade of “alternative facts,” of witch hunts, of flooding the zone with sh-t—it all amounted to a long, powerful education for his base. It’s a training in a certain kind of zen meditation, in which stories damaging to Trump pass from the eyes and ears directly out of the body without ever intersecting the brain. By now, the base has gotten in their 10,000 hours. They’ve become masters of the craft. They can perform all sorts of remarkable feats—the media-cope equivalent of lying on beds of nails while cinderblocks are smashed on their chests. These cinderblocks, they whisper serenely, are just a liberal plot. If I pay attention, the Democrats win.

This is just the way things are now. Catoggio:

Think of American government as a big neighborhood. The neighborhood has started to go to hell. Its residents are adjusting their expectations for it accordingly.…

This is why there’s been so little outcry about him pulling off the presidential equivalent of a bank heist, I think. If a business in a good neighborhood gets held up, everyone talks about it. But if a business in a bad neighborhood gets held up, it’s barely news. What can the locals realistically do except sigh and say, “Yeah, that happens now”?

The president is monetizing his office in broad daylight to the tune of billions per year? Yeah, that happens now.

No wonder, then, that Americans can’t get excited about Trump’s history with Epstein. If he were a person of good character committed to ethical government, it’d be earth-shaking to find him sending risqué letters to his child-molester pal. As it is, it’s like finding out that the leader of the local gang that runs the neighborhood is involved in a prostitution racket. You might not approve of it but you’re certainly not surprised.

That’s just how this neighborhood is nowadays.

It’s worth noting that in that last part he’s talking about why the centrist swing voters don’t seem to care much.

I’m convinced that this is the way things have been for decades before Trump, only it was slightly less obvious and less extreme. If the idea of reaping what you sow has any basis in politics, then we the voters are getting exactly, exactly, exactly what we’ve long deserved.

Kevin Williamson:

My thesis here isn’t that the secretary of health and human services acts like a crazy person because he takes drugs—it is that he takes drugs because he is, in fact, a crazy person, one whose career as public fraud, like his career as a private junkie, is characterized by “manic-like presentations defined by irritability, aggressiveness, euphoria, grandiose beliefs, hyperactivity, and reckless or dangerous behavior.” 

Kennedy’s thinking is junkie thinking: When within the space of a few sentences he insisted that COVID vaccines kill peopleand that Donald Trump deserves a Nobel prize for his role in implementing Operation Warp Speed, which developed the COVID vaccines, Kennedy took umbrage (“defined by irritability, aggressiveness”) at the notion that these two positions must be mutually exclusive. He is very much like [David Foster] Wallace’s addicts with their sense of metaphysical uniqueness and specialness: Everything that he wants to be true must be true and true at the same time, simply because he is “exempt from the laws of physics and statistics”—and logic—“that ironly govern everybody else.”