Sublime

The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands.

Human nature is hunted and has fled into sanctuary.

But despite these hopeful words, a look of desperate resignation passed between the two men. They knew the absentee landlords over in London didn’t care about the natives, so long as their plum Irish land continued to yield hearty profits, so long as the grains and cattle they extorted from Ireland continued to fetch their English fortunes.

Bentham’s

The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin – we must cultivate our garden – he said at the end of his satire Candide (1759). Notre jardin is that plot of soil on the earth, within the self, or amid the social collective, where “the cultural, ethical, and civic virtues that save reality from its own worst impulses are cultivated. Those virtues are always ours.”