In my latest Loonie Politics column I say a suggestion by a university psychologist, somewhat surprisingly, helps illuminate the frustrating way liberals and conservatives think, talk and shout past one another.
“If you want to know something about yourself, sit on your bed one night and say to yourself: ‘What is one thing I am doing wrong? That I know I am doing wrong, that I could fix, and that I would fix.’ You have to mean this. This is no game. You meditate on that and you will get an answer. It may not be the one you want but it will be the necessary one. Once you find it, you should push yourself beyond your limits of tolerance to find out where it is and how much you can work. Ask yourself, how disciplined can you be? Can you work 12 hours a day? Where is your limit? And how much work can you do? Push yourself and then back off to that point where it is sustainable. It is good to think about that as a goal. You do not want to have too much fun as it takes you out. So you want to make sure that what you are doing pushes you in every direction that you can, but you should be doing that with an aim in mind. You are trying to make yourself into a better and more competent person.”
Jordan Peterson “Discovering Personality – Black Friday Sale” email with internal title “Discover your limits” 27/11/22.
“Dear Mr. Chesterton,/ Isn’t one religion really just as good as another?/ Signed,/ ‘Level-Headed’/ Dear ‘Level-Headed,’/ How could it be? You have forgotten what religions are for, and have simply put the question wrong. You are asking me to choose, not even between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but between Hokey-pokey and Abracadabra. A religion is a thing which professes to tell the truth about the nature of the universe. How could any version of it be as true as any other, unless, of course, they are all of them in all respects false./ Your friend,/ G.K. Chesterton/ (Illustrated London News, Jan. 5, 1907; Gilbert Vol. 1, No. 6)”
“Chesterton’s Mail Bag” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22)
“The product of over-civilisation is shamelessness.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News May 2, 1908, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22)
“There’s just gotta be a place up ahead where men ain’t low-down and poker’s played fair. If there weren’t, what are all the songs about? I’ll see y’all there and we can sing together, and shake our heads over all the meanness in the Used-To-Be.”
The last words of Buster Scruggs as he approaches heaven with his harp and the duet fades out, in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
“the decade that taste forgot”
Regarding the 1970s, and attributed to “one journalist” by David P. Deavel in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22) (in a piece saying the late Fr. James V. Schall “never succumbed to the 1970s habit too many of his Jesuit confreres had of wearing the intellectual and spiritual (not to mention sartorial) clothing of that decade”.
“The next revolution is always perfect.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly Vol. 8 (September, 1928 – March, 1929) quoted in “Chesterton University An Introduction to the Writings of G.K. Chesterton by Dale Ahlquist” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22)
“Boomers, we know, didn’t appreciate getting long in the tooth. They’re the ones who started this whole fight against Old. But as a Gen Xer, I have to assume it’s worse for us. Our entire gestalt is built around an aura of disaffected youth. There is no natural progression for that energy into middle age. I don’t see us easing into words like ‘seasoned’ or ‘mature.’ Millennials will no doubt take their own kind of offense to aging when it’s their turn, but that is not our cross to bear.”
Pamela Paul “Wait, Who Did You Say Is Middle-Aged?” opinion piece in New York Times October 16, 2022