“Like many of the cocksure young men who forage about cities in apparent contentment and who express their cynicism in supercilious slang, Escott was shy and lonely.”
Sinclair Lewis Babbitt
“To look to the future is merely to forge a testimonial from the babe unborn.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Nov. 3, 1917, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)
In my latest Epoch Times column I argue that optimism is a psychological condition and generally fatuous, while hope is a theological virtue, in public affairs as in life more generally.
“I do not find myself often agreeing with the late Lord Keynes, but he has never said a truer thing than when he wrote, on a subject on which his own experience has singularly qualified him to speak, that ‘the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new ideas after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply are not likely to be the newest. But soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good and evil.’”
Friedrich Hayek “‘Free’ Enterprise and Competitive Order” in Individualism and Economic Order
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask where the campus protests and encampments are over dreadful treatment of women and gays under in Afghanistan… even if you don’t get to blame Jews.
“A consultant, we are advised, is a man who knows a hundred ways to make love and doesn’t have a girlfriend.”
Val Sears in Ottawa Sun December 16, 1998
“Do not try to rescue someone who does not want to be rescued.”
Tweet by Jordan Peterson January 16, 2024 [https://x.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1747332137882431572]
In my latest National Post column I warn that because ideas have consequences, and a powerful internal logic, progressive organizations that start with apparently non-controversial causes tend to slide into radical craziness, as with Ottawa’s Capital Pride that’s being boycotted even by Justin Trudeau because it’s so pro-Hamas and can’t stop itself.