“When a person identifies himself with a group, his reasoning faculties are diminished and his passions enhanced by a kind of emotive resonance or positive feedback.”
– Arthur Koestler
“A work of art is not a matter of thinking beautiful thoughts or experiencing tender emotions, but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowledge, discipline and industry; especially discipline.”
Evelyn Waugh
"True, the world still stands or spins, but the meaning has gone out of it. It is more dead, this illusory, everyday world, than if it had been shattered by a million atom bombs. We live as ghosts amid a world in ruins. All is senseless repetition."
~ Henry Miller
«El sentimiento cósmico de la acción, que actuó en todo gran hombre, desde los güelfos y gibelinos hasta Federico el Grande, Goethe y Napoleón, ha decaído hasta convertirse en una filosofía del trabajo»
—Oswald Spengler
“Globalisation is all about wealth. It knows the price of everything & the value of nothing. Without borders the world will become – is visibly becoming – a howling desert of traffic fumes, plastic & concrete, where nowhere is home and the only language is money.”
Peter Hitchens
The best way to destroy the intellectual - and thus moral - progress of a nation is to pay unintelligent people to join sophisticated and challenging conversations.
They just get confused, angry, offended, loud and aggressive.
Thus discourse - and progress - is destroyed.
The number one sign of the third world ification of the world is that you can get scammed on literally any transaction if you don’t practice professional levels of vigilance, suspicion and background checking. A High trust society doesn’t happen naturally.
The main problem with LLMs is that they give the illusion that you’re talking to someone with enormous knowledge but you’re actually talking to a personality that was spun up just for your prompt, a sort of ’domain midwit’, and a different prompt will give you a different midwit.
"How does reading philosophy help me make money, or get women to sleep with me?"
It doesn't.
Not everything in life is about making money and sleeping with women.
People decrying the collapse of trust in expertise and institutions are signaling their status on a sinking ship
The future belongs to those who can build outside of current architecture
Never forget that Tolkien supported the Francoist nationalists against the republicans in the Spanish civil war. He understood that the 20th century was a proxy war between nationalism and the various post-national leftisms of liberalism, international capitalism, and communism.