The Sleepwalk of the West

When even the Telegraph gushes over a Marxist philosopher, you know he’s finally attained social utopia. Slavoj Zizek is everywhere, with his radical (or is it radically bemusing?) ideas. The end justifies the means; why have a messy proletarian revolution when book sales will get you there instead?

Q: Why does the Left like Communism, again? A: Because the stock market’s down. Joking apart, there’s also a selfish reason. The idea of Communism is so abstract now, so cleansed of reality, that it can be invoked at zero cost. It’s a faux-humble chat-up line with a double payoff: you get to look impeccably [...]

Witness – the autobiography of Whittaker Chambers’ – is the dramatic story of a Dostoevskian “lesser man” seeking redemption through suffering and rigorous moral integrity. It is a verbose but remarkable book, centering on his personal pendulum-swing from a tortured, austere, and passionately felt Communism – towards an equally tortured, austere, and passionately felt Christianity. [...]

Imagine two people, each stood on the opposite banks of a river. Where then is the “average” of their positions? It’s midstream – the deep water. “Centrist” politics, as we know it today, treads water in such currents. So-called centrist governments are nothing of the sort. They are actually a remarkable co-existence of radically opposed [...]

Has there been a Marxist critique of dogs? Hopefully not. Any dog trainer will tell you that dogs are bourgeois wolves. Their wolf-nature remains, barely hidden below a reluctant concession to social norms, tenuously imposed by human authority. The hunter instinct, the killer bite, is still there. They chase anything that moves. Look at the [...]