The masculine spirit is under assault. It's obvious.
It's not just human nature to associate in tribes. It's deeper than that.
To me, ideology is corrupt; it's a parasite on religious structures. To be an ideologue is to have all of the terrible things that are associated with religious certainty and none of the utility. If you're an ideologue, you believe everything that you think. If you're religious, there's a mystery left there.
Assuming if there's such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?
I'm interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification.
As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.
I've studied authoritarianism for a very long time - for 40 years - and they're started by people's attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.
A properly balanced story provides an equal representation of the negative and positive attributes of, I could say the world, but it's actually a being. 'Harry Potter''s a good example. So Harry's the hero, right. But he's tainted with evil. There's a dark and a light in every bit of that narrative. It's well balanced.
You can't go backward in life.
If you don't stand your ground, then all that happens is people push you backwards.
Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.
The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are.
Whether or not I like a piece of data has very little bearing on whether or not I am likely to accept it.
I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.
Part of the core information that I've been purveying is that identity politics is a sick game. You don't play racial, ethnic, and gender identity games. The Left plays them on behalf of the oppressed, let's say, and the Right tends to play them on behalf of nationalism and ethnic pride. I think they're equally dangerous.
The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.
Some of these Ivy League kids want to have it both ways. They want to be baby members of the 1 percent, which they most certainly are, and yet still portray themselves as the oppressed.
I have a hard time figuring out what kind of box to put me in, too, because I don't know exactly what's going on around me or why. But I need to stay outside of boxes because then I can look at what's inside of them without being part of them.
You can't just slander someone, defame them, lie about them. You can't incite people to crime. There's all sorts of reasonable restrictions on free speech that are already codified in the British common-law system.
The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don't like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they're 95 percent dead wood.