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📎 Derrida’s Glas is Existentialism’s Manifesto of Radical Evil Methods of sophistry, coercion, deconstructing the meaning of words. Methods so subtle you don’t see how he leads you down the path of his madness. In the post-truth world, the discipline of philosophy is, today, pure sophistry. A sophist is one who has the skill of making the less persuasive argument seem more persuasive. The sophists at the European Graduate School are mad sophists who have swallowed their own lies, for so long, they have lost their reason. Deconstruction is the programming language of totalitarianism. By eroding boundaries and meaning, it opens spaces for corruption to enter. Over time it destroys institutions. As theory, deconstruction is evil enough. But when it entered our law schools and taught a generation of law professors and judges how to be, and create more, deconstructionist monsters, terror was loosed on us. Good and evil enter into the world through our words and through our hands, by the choices we make. I define evil as the unchecked drive to exploit vulnerability. Good is the impulse to protect the vulnerable. Radicalization is the process that brings theory into practice. Radical evil, then, is active, not passive. Radical evil makes a conscious choice to take action to exploit, even when there is a possibility to refrain from action and to do nothing at all. Radical evil exists only in the absence of compassion. The radical evil that animates the Paperclip Nazis drives their core values: total control, absolute exploitation, maximum efficiency, and exquisite deception. It is the “terminal shpilkes” of a Les Wexner — the constant craving for more vulnerability to exploit, and the unrestrained drive to actively seek it out. But the motive driving the radical evil of totalitarianism, as Arendt observed, is antihuman — a deliberate attempt to make human beings superfluous.  #lepropre stands for defense of life 🕊️