The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
Life can only be understood backwards. But it must be lived forwards.”
— Kierkegaard
Very true. The psychiatric industry has promoted the idea for years that until or unless you “deal with your past”, you cannot move forward. But they never take the time to explain or identify what “dealing with” the past means. Sure, it means going to a therapist on a weekly basis for an undetermined amount of time. While this may be a good deal for the therapist, it’s never explained what the patient or client is to get out of it. It’s simply an article of unarticulated faith.
The past only matters in terms of its impact on who you are in the present. The solution to your problems isn’t to say, “Well, a lot of things happened to me in my past. I have to talk about them indefinitely.” The solution is closer to something like this: “A lot of things happened to me in the past. Some of those things were terrible. So how did I survive them? What strengths do I have, to get as far as I have despite this past? And what faulty thinking or behavior in the present still exists because of the past? Why is the thinking or behavior faulty, and what steps can I start taking TODAY — even small steps — to act or think in a different way?”
You don’t have to talk about the past for the sake of talking about the past. Again, this may be good for the psychiatric industry professional who’s getting paid. What you need is more of a life coach, than a therapist. The life coach can help you identify what your strengths are and how you can capitalize on those strengths in the present, and in the future.
Some are calling Biden’s brazen, illegal handling of top secret documents the biggest political scandal in American history.
Not so.
The biggest political scandal in American history is what happened in 2020 thru 2022 — the rigging of two national elections with subjective voting; a totalitarian lockdown over the flu unprecedented in human history; and the toppling of an American president for telling the truth. Anything Biden did, however monstrous, pales in comparison with the willfull, gleeful and brazenly open violation of our Bill of Rights coming out of the twisted regime for which he is merely a demented, quasicomical puppet.
Show me a scandal greater than what we have endured in America over the last 3 years. You won’t find one.
America has become a nation of ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’. Everyone is getting over a ‘trauma’ or ‘processing’. They demand special privileges because of the suffering of their ancestors. They trot out studies which prove that they are somehow disadvantaged. They gorge on self-help books and deploy therapy terminology to accuse everyone else of mistreating them.
Our society has turned into a cross between a Marxist academic conference and therapy session where Marxist terminology like “systemic racism” and therapy talk like “gaslighting narcissist” form key parts of the grammar of perpetual victimhood.
Politics has been reduced to victimhood advocacy and we are worse off for it.
Victims are not good people. Postmodern influencer culture conflates ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’, but they are two very different things. Survivors are people who pick themselves up and go on. Victims give up and spend the rest of their lives doing nothing except blaming everyone else.
After the slaves were freed, some made long journeys to major cities, others built families and worked hard to provide for them. They perserved despite lynchings and racism. Over 150 years later, some of their descendants claim that nothing can be expected from them because they’re suffering from Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome even though the only place they’ve seen slavery is on television. That’s the difference between survivors and victims.
After the Holocaust, Jewish people who had seen their entire families killed in front of them remarried, had children and started their lives again. Often they didn’t even talk about what they had experienced until decades had passed. Others helped build a nation out of the desert sands. Now some of their great-grandchildren claim they’re so fragile they need safe spaces.
The same is true of all Americans. We are all the descendants of survivors. Our grandparents and great-grandparents fought in wars, persisted through economic turmoil and didn’t give up. Whatever happened to them, they didn’t see themselves as the victims. They were strong, not because they postured on social media, but because they got up whenever they were knocked down. They had their grievances and resentments, but they didn’t build their lives around them.
Survivors are motivated by love and duty. They understand that there is more to life than their own pain. They redeem their suffering by making their lives matter. That is the essence of the human ideal. It’s how nations and families are built. And it’s how our nation is coming apart.
Victims are driven by hate. Their pain is performance. It’s what makes them special and the only purpose left to them. The more they feel, the angrier they get. And they want to be angry. There are victims who have actually suffered, but the majority in our culture are ‘identity victims’ or ‘therapy victims’ whose victimhood is based on the terminology of academic Marxism or shrink sessions: who have suffered nothing except a lack of emotional fulfillment.
These creatures, who once handed out radical fliers at campus cafes and poisoned family reunions, went ‘viral’ through social media and generated legions of sympathetic followers. Their perpetual outrage at being victims drives our culture and our politics. Incapable of talking about anything other than themselves, they have ‘built their brand’ into the model for our society.
America went from a nation of courage, allegiance and responsibility where people made commitments to something larger than themselves, used their pain to build better things, to a society of wallowers competing over who has the biggest pain and the least responsibility.
The difference between survivors and victims is that survivors have a larger purpose, while victims have made victimhood into their purpose. And they want it to be our purpose.
Politics has become a dysfunctional therapy session, an intersectional debate over whose pain is superior, and who is just faking it, as if nations are defined by individual pain rather than cultures of aspiration. New victimhood causes proliferate every day while the old ones fight it out. Whose pain is superior, feminists or transgender men? Trauma is our national resource now and there’s only so much of it to go around. Those who have the most are at the top.
Victimhood grants a moral superiority that liberates the victim from moral responsibility.
If you’re an official victim, you can rampage around cities, looting, beating and burning, with few legal and certainly no moral consequences. Beyond economics, replacing ‘equality’ with ‘equity’ takes us from an equality of moral obligations to an equity of moral outcomes. And race riots, canceling people, and rigging college admissions are just ways of achieving ‘moral equity’.
Behavior that is objectively wrong, violence, hate, harassment and terrorism, becomes right if the perpetrators are victims who claim to be striving for a society of moral equity. But the truth about victims is that they never want to stop being what they are. If they did, they would become survivors. Victimhood is convenient and comforting. Victims never have to learn to do better. They spend all of their time telling others to do better so that xer’s feelings aren’t hurt again.
Victimhood views failure as a conspiracy, rather than a choice, and nations and societies that embrace victimhood quickly turn into failed states. America used to get things done. Now we no longer win wars or can even stock supermarkets. There are a thousand points of failure and they begin with a culture that is hostile to achievement and supportive of victimhood.
Our educational system promotes those who refuse to learn, government subsidizes professional victimhood and corporations overlook those who work in favor of those who don’t, but are more likely to sue or throw a public tantrum. Trillions are spent with no return and nothing gets done because the real product is the virtue signaling of victimhood.
Victimhood is an excuse for failure and so we’ve become an unserious society. Victims are incapable of thinking about anything except themselves and our culture has become stuck in the same narcissistic loop of personalities. Everyone wants to be a celebrity, to feel special, and to play the victim when the social media collective fails to give them the due that they deserve.
The loudest voices are those who complain rather than inspire, who give up rather than get ahead, who explain that the game is rigged so everyone should join them in staying home.
Victims make a fetish of their pain. They are ‘in touch with their emotions’ because they inhabit them all the time. They are so busy selfishly feeling their feelings that they can’t be bothered to care about the impact on anyone else. Just as eskimos have many words for ‘snow’, victims have many ways to describe their pain. Their unhappiness is ‘trauma’, talking to people is ‘unpaid emotional labor’ and they spend all their time ‘processing’ or feeling their feelings.. Watching Netflix is ‘self-care’ to recover from all the ‘trauma’ of all their ‘unpaid emotional labor’.
Even their most ordinary activities are part of the fantastic drama that is their existence. Every breath they take is a labored ‘resistance’ to a vast systemic conspiracy out to destroy them.
And while such woke performative antics are more common among social media millennials than in everyday life, the underlying conviction that our emotions matter more than our responsibilities, that anger exempts us from morality, and truth takes a backseat to ‘my truth’ has spread throughout our culture with disastrous results on our functioning and our future.
A society is inspired by its leading figures and its culture is shaped by its stories. Victimhood has become our story. It pervades our classrooms, our fiction, our new myths and our discourse. It has left us in a state of arrested development because we have become incapable of moving forward. Instead of building new things, we rehash past history, purge ‘problematic’ figures and assign blame for the failures of the present to the dead history of the past.
Victimhood is obsessed with the past. Unlike survivors, victims never want to move forward. They want to remain tethered to the moments that defined them. America was always a nation that looked forward, that imagined the impossible and then realized it. Now, like many backward societies, it has become stuck in the past, rewriting its history to make its founding more evil, churning out excuses for today’s failures in the endless root causes for infinite victimhood.
No wonder most Americans, for the first time in history, no longer believe in a better future.
America was a nation of survivors. It can only endure as a nation that looks to the future. A nation of victims is doomed to fail. It fails because that is the only way its victims can succeed.
Imagine if we had tried to defeat our enemies in WW II by holding elections run by Nazis, with results reported by a media who only published Nazi propaganda.
Imagine winning the Cold War if pro-Soviet Communists controlled nearly every American school board, every American television or movie production house, nearly every American media outlet and every branch of our vast, massively expanding federal government.
Today’s government and culture consists of people just as bad. They have no limits, other than seeing how much they can get away with. So far, and especially since 2020, they have gotten away with absolutely everything. On every single issue from lockdowns, to forced participation in government medical vaccine research, to FBI raids and arrests for political reasons alone, to legalized looting in city streets, to arbitrary executive edicts on everything under the sun, to mail-in ballots favoring one party only, to outlawing fossil fuels in 8 years, to outlawing gas stoves immediately, we are up against tyrants who oppose the side of liberty in EACH AND EVERY instance, and who are winning EACH AND EVERY battle in their relentless war against freedom.
So few of us act like we care.
They are not going to stop and this will not get better on its own. Think about what you’re giving up. Freedom is the moral and intellectual air we breathe. When all freedom is finally gone, we will all perish spiritually, if not physically. If you love life, yourself and your children, you should love your freedom too.
Tyrants never have credibility. They say one thing; and they do the opposite. It has always been this way, since the beginning of human civilization, or even before that. Nothing has changed.
Today’s tyrants are worse than ever. They detest capitalism; but they live off of billions, usually money made through theft or via political connections (case in point: the Biden crime family). For people who hate the system of wealth creation, they sure love their own wealth. They want their billions, but if you or I want another $50,000 in our private retirement accounts, honestly saved and earned … well, forget it. THAT money belongs to the government.
They claim to be religious or “spiritual”; yet they are ruthless and mercenary beyond description. I’m talking about the stuff they do right in front of our faces. Behind the scenes — we can only imagine. No “conspiracy theories” are necessary. These people are making laughing stocks out of the majority of us who keep rolling over and taking it because, “Why, if someone hears me saying or even implying something mean — well, they won’t like me, and I can’t have that!”
These tyrants of today scream about the evils of self-interest. Yet they sacrifice other people to themselves on a daily basis. And they LAUGH while doing it.
Let me be clear: Rationally speaking, there’s nothing wrong with self-interest. Self-interest is even a virtue, because we are all entitled to our own lives, and this requirement for self-preservation (when honored) makes us responsible for ourselves too. Paradoxically, the people who feel entitled to their own lives prosper better, and, in turn, feel more generous — even though that generosity is never a duty or obligation. It’s just something you want to do, when you can, and when you’ve done well yourself. That’s why economically free societies are far, far more generous than totalitarian, socialist ones. Even our own society, as it has become more socialist, has become more mean-spirited than ever before. That’s how it works.
Today’s tyrants are even worse than tyrants of the past. What I mean by that is they smirk, giggle and laugh as they destroy us. They know they’re hypocrites and while they don’t totally admit it, when busted they are not ashamed. They just triple down.
They’re openly, mockingly sadistic. It’s not possible for a decent person to comprehend the magnitude of the ruthlessness and evil we’re up against — sure, with the vast majority of our politicians, but also our corporate, woke “big business” socialists who (even if they made their money honestly) turn around (e.g. Bill Gates) and willfully, laughingly seek to bring the rest of us down. It’s psychopathic, cruel and every bit as evil as the Stalins and Hitlers of the past. Maybe even more so, if that’s possible. They demand that we take experimental vaccines, that we stop eating beef, that we stop driving cars, and they do it with a narcissistic, nasty, inflated sense of self-importance they expect us to take for granted. Was there EVER a royal dictator in history as bad as these corporate-political Communists of today?
We have to stand up for ourselves and, if nothing else, passively resist. Go on strike — morally, psychologically and in other ways, too. Otherwise, they’re going to bring us down with them. That’s what psychopaths do.
Get out of your slumber, people! This is not going to get better on its own.
In the case of Trump, a commentator said, “at least he had [classified documents] under lock and key, not sitting by his riding lawn mower.”
It doesn’t matter. This is not about national security. That ship has sailed. The occupation we still fantasize as the government of a free republic is only concerned with prosecution of political enemies.
Trump will be harassed and punished; Biden will not. End of story.
#NotMyDictatorship
P.S. Will the White House, Soros, Pelosi, Zuckerberg and Bezos kitchen stoves still cook with gas?
Americans are increasingly questioning the assumption that every kid should go to college. While it’s still the right path for many, higher education is also failing many students, leaving them in piles of debt but with degrees that are pretty impractical.
What makes these majors the least useful? Well, Business Insider came up with the list by surveying experts about job prospects and starting salaries. Many degrees on this list are not actually necessary to work in the targeted industry they relate to, or, require multiple advanced degrees in the subject before one can do so.
Now, this doesn’t mean there’s no intellectual or moral merit to any of these fields of study. But it does mean that you shouldn’t drown yourself in subsidized government debt just to pursue one of these majors knowing the limited prospects that await you. If you really want to study English, great, but maybe don’t rack up $200,000 in loans to do so. Start at a local community college or affordable state school, instead.
Otherwise, you’ll end up like the 44% of college graduates who regret their choice in major, per a recent ZipRecruiter survey. (Surprise surprise, communications, marketing, English, and other majors from the Insider list are also among the majors most commonly regretted after-the-fact.)
There’s also a public policy dimension to this conversation.
As I explain in a new New York Postcolumn, President Biden’s latest plan for student debt “relief,” aka debt-transfer to taxpayers, subsidizes the least productive degrees the most. On the other hand, it subsidizes the most productive, in-demand degrees like computer science and engineering the least. That makes zero sense.
We need to promote alternative paths to higher education, like training programs and apprenticeships. We also need to ensure that when young people do go to college, they make smart decisions aligned with market incentives. Otherwise, more young Americans will end up with useless degrees they regret and nothing but mountains of debt to show for it.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 