ANTHONY HOPKINS:

“Let go the people who are not prepared to love you. This is the hardest thing you will have to do in your life and it will also be the most important thing. Stop having hard conversations with people who don’t want change.

Stop showing up for people who have no interest in your presence. I know your instinct is to do everything to earn the appreciation of those around you, but it’s a boost that steals your time, energy, mental and physical health.

When you begin to fight for a life with joy, interest and commitment, not everyone will be ready to follow you in this place. This doesn’t mean you need to change what you are, it means you should let go of the people who aren’t ready to accompany you.

If you are excluded, insulted, forgotten or ignored by the people you give your time to, you don’t do yourself a favor by continuing to offer your energy and your life. The truth is that you are not for everyone and not everyone is for you.

That’s what makes it so special when you meet people who reciprocate love. You will know how precious you are.

The more time you spend trying to make yourself loved by someone who is unable to, the more time you waste depriving yourself of the possibility of this connection to someone else.

There are billions of people on this planet and many of them will meet with you at your level of interest and commitment.

The more you stay involved with people who use you as a pillow, a background option or a therapist for emotional healing, the longer you stay away from the community you want.

Maybe if you stop showing up, you won’t be wanted. Maybe if you stop trying, the relationship will end. Maybe if you stop texting your phone will stay dark for weeks. That doesn’t mean you ruined the relationship, it means the only thing holding it back was the energy that only you gave to keep it. This is not love, it’s attachment. It’s wanting to give a chance to those who don’t deserve it. You deserve so much, there are people who should not be in your life.

The most valuable thing you have in your life is your time and energy, and both are limited. When you give your time and energy, it will define your existence.

When you realize this, you begin to understand why you are so anxious when you spend time with people, in activities, places or situations that don’t suit you and shouldn’t be around you, your energy is stolen.

You will begin to realize that the most important thing you can do for yourself and for everyone around you is to protect your energy more fiercely than anything else. Make your life a safe haven, in which only ′′compatible′′ people are allowed.

You are not responsible for saving anyone. You are not responsible for convincing them to improve. It’s not your work to exist for people and give your life to them! If you feel bad, if you feel compelled, you will be the root of all your problems, fearing that they will not return the favours you have granted. It’s your only obligation to realize that you are the love of your destiny and accept the love you deserve.

Decide that you deserve true friendship, commitment, true and complete love with healthy and prosperous people. Then wait and see how much everything begins to change. Don’t waste time with people who are not worth it. Change will give you the love, the esteem, happiness and the protection you deserve.”

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Wisdom

Everything today is political. That’s one of the ugliest and hardest things about today. Culturally, we’re already a Communist society; because that’s what it’s like in a Communist society. The God is government and the religion is the state. Try escaping politics today. Try not wearing a mask in most parts of the country. Try not being “woke”. Try even being quiet, or non-political. People are scared to death to even hit “like” on a non-woke post. Why is nobody scared of conservatives, Republicans, Trump-lovers or libertarians? And yet everyone is scared to death of leftists. Because, as I said, it’s like we’re already a Communist society.

People who want to make everything political are after power. In some cases, it’s literal, physical power. More often, it’s psychological. The woke twenty-five-year-old still living in his childhood bedroom at his parents’ house will not attain power, neither in business nor government. His power is limited to the Internet, perhaps social media. But power is the motive. When you turn things that aren’t political, or need not be political, into political issues, your obvious goal is to intimidate people. When you intimidate or cause people to be in annoying if not life-threatening dilemmas, you attain a sense of power you would not otherwise achieve through productive means — and believe you are incapable of achieving. In this sense, the power mongers destroying our culture and freedom are life’s biggest losers. Whatever talent and capabilities they may possess, they squander those virtues and potentialities on politics. Because politics is where the power is. They don’t believe they are capable of being architects, engineers, artists, medical professionals, small business people or anything else productive. So they impose their irrationality and neuroses on the rest of us — finding most of us, at least up to now, more than willing to grudgingly comply.

I recently read an excellent book. It’s called “The Madness of Crowds” by Douglas Murray. Published in 2019, it’s perfectly timed for the unraveling of the Western World we are witnessing in 2020 and 2021. The author doesn’t explicitly name the precise cause of today’s demise: the death of reason. But throughout the book he asks reasonable questions and exposes error after error, and absurd contradiction after absurd contradiction, regarding the insanity of our times, both on and off social media. Unlike a lot of thinkers, he correctly points out that reason is not the goal of today’s “woke” tyrants. It never was. Marxists celebrate the inherent contradiction of the “dialactic”, going back to the time of Marx. They love contradictions in the same way they love destruction. They’re not trying to create a beautiful or utopian society. They sneer at Martin Luther King’s vision of “color blindness.” Racism finally died out in America. THIS is what drove them mad. They have to bring divisiveness and hatred back. It’s how they make a living and, far worse: it’s how they thrive.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Scores of millions of Americans sense that something terrible has been happening in our country recently.  Democracy has been steadily slipping away for years, but never faster than in the catastrophic year of 2020.   Meanwhile, the process continues at an ever-increasing rate under the administration of the cognitively declining man in the White House.  Incompetent tyrants at the federal, state, and local level rule the American people.  Who knew that anonymous local health officials could violate our property rights by shutting down small businesses and that governors could restrict our rights to freedom of association and of worship?  Who knew that social media corporations could censor our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech? 

Leading American corporations publicly embrace the radical agenda of the far left while holding in contempt much of the population whom they seem to regard as “white supremacists.”   It would be hard to find a major American corporation with an international presence that does not think of itself in global rather than national terms.  This should not be surprising.  Globalism is the antithesis of nationalism — or should I say, patriotism.

CEOs of major corporations act like oligarchs who can do as they please as long as they have government on their side.  So, they donate hundreds of millions of dollars either directly or indirectly to the party of government and tilt the electoral process toward their friends in high places. What’s more, many of those big corporations have gone woke in an effort to please their Democrat allies.   In the aftermath of the recent intervention by much of corporate America into the controversy about Georgia’s election law, many conservatives are awakening to the magnitude of this problem.  Scores of millions of Americans feel helpless in the face of this overwhelming threat posed to our liberty.

What most Americans don’t know — because we don’t teach history very well anymore — is that we faced a very similar dilemma before and that Americans charted a path to overcome the corporate oligarchy of another era.  Our ancestors even gave us many of the tools we need to bend our modern oligarchs to the popular will.   Ironically, given the behavior and ideas of their contemporary namesakes, they were known as “progressives.”

The corporate oligarchs of the past had names like Rockefeller, Morgan, and Carnegie.  Along with scores of lesser tycoons, they ran “trusts” which used their monopolistic power to crush competitors and undermine the free market system of business enterprise.  Money bought them enormous influence in the courts, statehouses, and even in Congress.  Through their enterprise they created much of modern America, but they did it in such a manner as to rouse enormous hostility. Though it did not always seem so at the time, they did a great deal of good and gradually raised standards of living throughout much of the nation, and ultimately the world.  The problem was that their unrestricted power and influence threatened to destroy both the free enterprise system and democracy itself.

response, agrarian “populists,” and urban “progressives,” the reformers of their time, organized, agitated, and enlisted the assistance of friendly members of the press in a crusade to use the power of government to subject private power to the public will.  Over the course of many years, they successfully established two major tools to deal with the threat of monopoly created by big business.  One was the use of the government power to regulate business activities.  The other was the employment of government force to break up enterprises that became so big and powerful as to threaten the ability of the people to govern themselves.  The latter was anti-trust action.  During the course of the twentieth century, anti-trust action was used intermittently in a handful of high-profile court cases while ongoing regulation of big business on a day-to-day basis by government agencies became routine.  It is time to revive the use of anti-trust action to deal with the oligarchs of our time. 

Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has recently introduced a bill into Congress called the “Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act.”  In promoting his legislation Hawley rightly said that “a small group of woke mega-corporations control… the information Americans can receive, and the speech Americans can engage in.”  Although Americans of the early twentieth century had never heard of a “woke mega-corporation,” and monopolistic control of the flow of information in a free society was inconceivable, otherwise the language in that sentence could have been lifted almost verbatim from the political debates of one hundred-twenty years ago. 

Two of the progressive reform leaders and presidents of the era were Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, one a Republican and the other a Democrat.  Roosevelt earned a reputation as a “trust-buster,” because his administration conducted a number of high-profile anti-trust suits against the likes of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, and the financial magnate J.P. Morgan’s Northern Securities Company, but his preferred course of action was to deal with “malefactors of great wealth” through regulation rather than by breaking them up.  This eventually led, during the 1912 presidential campaign, to an ongoing debate between TR and Wilson, who feared that federal regulation of the type TR advocated, would eventually lead to partnership between the government and big business.  This in turn Wilson thought would create such a powerful combination that the common man would have little chance to compete and succeed.   Accordingly, he championed the more aggressive use of anti-trust action to break up powerful monopolies and re-establish free market conditions.  In Wilson’s vision, the fragments that remained after the trusts were broken up would be compelled to compete against one another, thereby creating greater opportunity for entrepreneurs to challenge their dominance.

Ironically, while in office Wilson came around to TR’s position and used regulatory action more aggressively than TR ever did.  Indeed, during the First World War he went so far as to use the power of the federal government to temporarily seize and run a wide variety of war industries.  Although the government takeover was abandoned after the war, the idea of government-business partnership inspired the establishment of the second Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration (NRA) during the Depression.  In a final irony, it looks as though Wilson’s fears of business-government partnership have been realized in our time.  But even he never imagined that a woke tyranny of the self–loathing would take root in American corporations and hijack the federal government. 

Early twentieth-century progressives provided citizens with yet additional tools to fight despotism.  Reformers in some states, California prominent among them, made provision in their state constitutions for the initiative and referendum and the recall of incompetent or tyrannical officials.  This makes it possible for citizens to override the state legislatures when they are unresponsive to the public will.  It also makes it possible to recall recalcitrant public officials such as Governor Gavin Newsom.  The initiative process could be used to restrict the powers of local health officials to order destructive and unconstitutional lockdowns.

Unfortunately, there is little chance that Hawley’s legislation will be passed before a new conservative administration takes over in Washington and a friendly majority is in control of Congress.  Nevertheless, American citizens can make use of some of these tools established by progressive reformers over a hundred years ago to make it more difficult for tyrants to trample on their liberties.

Richard Speed, American Thinker

Remember when the economy was booming back in 2019? I remember people saying, “How can the Democrats possibly defeat Trump?” Well, they did it. Not just with fraud. They frightened half the population and mightily annoyed the other half. Either way, they got submission. And they crushed the economy by simply shutting everything down. They hooked millions on unemployment — like heroin or coke dealers hook people on drugs. They made small businesses dependent on federal “rescue” plans for damage generated by the media and government. Nobody, myself included, fully grasped how evil and calculating these sociopaths in charge of our government, universities, corporations, social media companies and entire culture are. We sure know now.

There will be significant pushback. Millions are still bewildered, in denial or simply hope the actual Communists and fascists in charge don’t mean it all (they do). I can’t predict how, when or what form the pushback will take. I only know: Good and decent people will only take so much. There will be a limit.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Wisdom

I have been thinking a good deal recently about Arnold Toynbee’s much-quoted observation that “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” As an historical proposition, I’d say that it was like the story of the curate’s breakfast egg. “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr. Jones!” “Oh no, my Lord, I assure you!” the curate replied. “Parts of it are excellent!”

And yet we all see the pertinence of Toynbee’s point. While there are, as a matter of historical fact, plenty of civilizations that succumb to invasion, occupation, and subjugation, there are also many that wither from within from a failure of self-confidence, of (for the Bergsonians out there) élan vital, of what your philosophy graduate student likes to call thumos: spirit, gumption, “heart,” manliness. 

The fact that no one can even speak of “manliness” today without looking over his shoulder these days is an index that thumos is on the endangered species list (along, as it happens, with sperm counts in the Western world). Why this should be is a fraught question—something whose answer is “overdetermined” as our Freudian friends like to say. 

One major reason, I submit, is that the dominant ideology of the modern West is an ideology of suicide, what the philosopher James Burnham identified as “liberalism.” 

It goes without saying that when it comes to terms being “overdetermined,” “liberalism” is right up at the top. The word has its root in līber, free, which is why it used to be said that tolerance was a defining characteristic of liberalism. Edmund Burke was a liberal in this sense, as was Matthew Arnold, David Hume, James Madison, and other founding fathers.

But that was a long time ago. Nowadays, “liberalism” is distinguished above all by its illiberalism and intolerance. Thus the ideology of “wokeness” and the prevalence therein of the rhetoric of “microaggressions,” “trigger warnings,” and “safe spaces.” If being offended is grounds for interdicting speech then the goal is not tolerance, comrade, but conformity. And it is a short step from that realization to a bureaucracy whose primary aim is the enforcement of that conformity. 

I suspect that certain wrinkles in our current political dispensation would have surprised Burnham. I don’t believe that he foresaw the humid, hothouse dimension of “the way we live now.” The more exotic precincts of sexual enfranchisement, for example, would have prompted a raised eyebrow, as would such phenomena as the military provision of “maternity flight suits,” “gender reassignment” surgery, and spurious charges of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” But in essentials, he correctly identified the pathology. 

The issue, Burnham saw, is that modern allotropes of liberalism have equipped us with an ethic that is far too abstract and too empty to inspire existential allegiance. Modern liberalism, Burnham wrote in Suicide of the West, 

does not offer ordinary men compelling motives for personal suffering, sacrifice, and death. There is no tragic dimension in its picture of the good life. Men become willing to endure, sacrifice, and die for God, for family, king, honor, country, from a sense of absolute duty or an exalted vision of the meaning of history. . . . And it is precisely these ideas and institutions that liberalism has criticized, attacked, and in part overthrown as superstitious, archaic, reactionary, and irrational. In their place liberalism proposes a set of pale and bloodless abstractions—pale and bloodless for the very reason that they have no roots in the past, in deep feeling and in suffering. Except for mercenaries, saints, and neurotics, no one is willing to sacrifice and die for progressive education, medicare, humanity in the abstract, the United Nations, and a ten percent rise in Social Security payments.

Thus it is that Burnham could conclude that the primary function of liberalism was to “permit Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution,” to view weakness, failure, even collapse as not as a defeat but “as the transition to a new and higher-order in which Mankind as a whole joins in a universal civilization that has risen above the parochial distinctions, divisions, and discriminations of the past.”

Sound familiar? Of course, it does. It’s the hit tune that is playing on every college campus, and that echoes throughout the bulletins emitted by HR departments of major corporations, and the bleatings of Hollywood stars, media “celebrities,” and woke personalties whose affluence is matched only by their ignorance and unconscious commitment to mouthing the sanctioned progressive clichés of the moment. 

A Two-Pronged Attack

I bring up James Burnham’s contention that the ideology of liberalism is a prescription for civilizational suicide not because I want to argue his case but as a prolegomenon, what Kierkegaard called a “preliminary expectoration,” regarding the curious pincer movement we see at work in America today. 

One of the strangest things about the current administration (I hesitate to call it the “Biden Administration” because Joe Biden is clearly just a puppet in the hands of the factions and personalities that engineered his “election”)—one of the strangest features of the administration, I say, is the breathless velocity with which they are proceeding the bring about that “fundamental transformation of the United States of America” that Biden’s predecessor and (possibly) puppet master Barack Obama promised. 

The current administration is behaving as if it had a huge popular mandate. In fact, it won, if it won, by the narrowest of margins. (I’ll repeat parenthetically here what I have said elsewhere: I believe Donald Trump actually won but that the concerted efforts of his opponents overturned the election.) And stepping down from the top spot, the election of 2020 was a disaster for the Democrats, though not, I predict, as much of a disaster as the 2022 election will be. And yet here they are behaving as if Karl Marx, if not Mao Zedong himself, had been elected instead of a senile factotum who was supposed to bring back “normalcy,” national unity, and political “bipartisanship.”

How’s that working out? I am going to ignore the disaster at our Southern border, the fiscal nightmare that Biden’s spending and tax programs are causing, and even the brewing international emergency that his supine posture regarding China and Iran (combined with his belligerence towards Russia) are fomenting. I’d just like to mention two prongs of that pincer movement I mentioned above. They might seem like minor, unrelated initiatives. I think they speak to a deep and spiritually unified rot in the American soul. about:blank

The first claw of the pincer was the announcement a few days ago that the state of Virginia was seeking to eliminate special courses in advanced mathematics for high school students before the 11th grade. Why in heaven’s name would they do this? Why, in order to foster “equity,” of course—which is to say, in order to foster the malign spirit of egalitarianism and prevent any students from excelling. 

Quoth a Virginia educrat named Jennifer Allard, 

Many of our students do not have access to the mathematics that they will need either in their personal or professional adult lives. The issue of inequity in mathematics education makes it essential for us to initiate serious discussions among a variety of stakeholders to achieve the critical mass necessary to catalyze change in school mathematics.

“Stakeholders.” Do you have to read any further? The truth is that some people (not I, alas) are clever at math, others are not. It is a matter of national security that we encourage those who are clever at math to excel. Allard and her colleagues are pursuing the lowest common denominator, a course of action that our opponents in China, Iran, and Russia will only applaud. 

Cancerous Critical Race Theory

The attack on excellence and achievement is one side of the pincer movement. The other side is the injection of Marxist ideology, dressed up in a new rhetorical garb, into not only our school but also the workplace and throughout the federal government.

As commentator Stanley Kurtz noted in the New York Post on Friday, “Joe Biden’s Department of Education has signaled its intent to impose the most radical forms of critical race theory on America’s schools, very much including the “1619 Project” and the so-called anti-racism of Ibram X. Kendi (which advocates a massive and indefinite expansion of reverse discrimination).” 

What is “critical race theory”? Many readers of American Greatness will know, But I think the documentary filmmaker and writer Christopher Rufo, who has done as much as anyone to expose the toxic nature of the movement, is right: “most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it.” 

Although it was born in the fetid corridors of academia, CRT (as it is often abbreviated) has escaped from the laboratory and is infecting the population at large. “[I]t has,” Rufo writes, “increasingly become the default ideology in our public institutions over the past decade. It has been injected into government agencies, public school systems, teacher training programs, and corporate human-resources departments, in the form of diversity-training programs, human-resources modules, public-policy frameworks, and school curricula.” But what is it, exactly?

It is radical Marxism, dusted off and given lessons in the new vocabulary of anti-America “resistance”: climate change, “heteronormativity,” and racism, racism, racism. As Rufo observes, 

Its supporters deploy a series of euphemisms to describe critical race theory, including ‘equity,’ ‘social justice,’ ‘diversity and inclusion,’ and ‘culturally responsive teaching.’ Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that ‘neo-Marxism’ would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality. But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, critical race theorists explicitly reject equality—the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. To them, equality represents ‘mere nondiscrimination’ and provides ‘camouflage’ for white supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression.

So here we are. There were some people who thought that James Burnham’s identification of liberalism with civilization suicide was hyperbolic. They also tended to scoff at the idea that the primary function of liberalism was to “permit Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution.” I wonder what they would say now?

About Roger Kimball

Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine’s Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee).