Some months after leaving the IMT, I bought a collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings. I’ve flipped through it only a few times, and it has been lying on my bookshelf, pregnant with dormant wisdom, for the last couple of years. For some reason, I never read his most famous essay, ‘Self-Reliance’ (1841), until just … Read more
315. WEAK SECTS. – Those sects which feel that they will always remain weak hunt up a few intelligent individual adherents, wishing to make up in quality what they lack in quantity. This gives rise to no little danger for intelligent minds. -The Dawn of Daybreak
Trot cultists would have you believe that dialectical materialism is a profound philosophy whose truths only Marxism and its ‘science’ could possibly have gifted to the world. So much of it turns out to be well-worn philosophical ground, stuff that we started taking for granted a while ago. Take the following statement from Trotsky’s 1939 … Read more
Anyone who has read my post on Janja Lalich and her concept of bounded choice in a cult will appreciate this piercing observation by Nietzsche: 301. “STRENGTH OF CHARACTER.”-“What I have said once I will do.” – This manner of thinking is believed to indicate great strength of character. How many actions are accomplished, not … Read more
And though I hope not unscathed to go, Who conquers me shall find a stubborn foe. The time hath been, when no harsh sound would fall From lips that now may seem imbued with gall; Nor fools nor follies tempt me to despise The meanest thing that crawl’d beneath my eyes: But now, so callous … Read more
how little, to him, does the changing of an opinion seem contemptible per se! On the contrary, how highly he prizes the ability to change an opinion as a rare and valuable distinction, especially if he can retain it far into old age! And his pride (not his pusillanimity) even reaches so high as to be able to pluck the … Read more
Over the past several days I have felt an incredible lightness of spirit. Perhaps I am finally learning, as Nietzsche taught, to love my fate, and to accept all that has happened to me, awful as it has been. Whilst I am not entirely free of anger at the IMT and its monstrous oppression, I … Read more
…and-I have escaped. Think not that I will urge you to run the same perilous risk! or that I will urge you on even to the same solitude! For whoever proceeds on his own path meets nobody: this is the feature of one’s “own path.” No one comes to help him in his task: he … Read more
Being in the IMT was a miserable experience. But there is much I have learned from it. If there is anything I have learned from reading philosophy, it is amor fati – the love of fate, a concept taught by the Ancient Stoics and also by modern philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche. It is hard to … Read more
“What if I were to die! What if I could go back to life – what eternity! And it would all be mine! I would turn every minute into an age; I would lose nothing, I would count every minute as it passed, I would not waste one!”-Prince Myshkin in The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky … Read more