Status Updates From The New Vichy Syndrome: Why...

Dean Acheson once said that Britain had lost an empire and not found a role. You might say of Europe that it had lost its purpose, and not found any to replace it.

limitless guilt being a form of grandiosity, the past commission of great crimes is a consolation for those who have lost power. It assures them that, notwithstanding their loss of the more immediate trappings of power, important, indeed determining, factors in the current situation of the world are traceable to them.

When the French first tried to invade Algeria in the sixteenth century, the Algerian Jews sided with the Moslem power, perhaps partly from a consideration of who was more likely to win, but also because they believed that they would be treated better by the Moslem than the Christian power.

individualism without individuality. People who are unwilling to brook the slightest restriction imposed by any authority are completely subservient to the tastes, opinions, and mores of their peers, and intolerant of deviation from them by others.

The second baleful effect of the view of life as an existential supermarket is that no choice is taken very seriously, because a whole future of choices spreads endlessly before one, like a landscape without a horizon.

The second baleful effect of the view of life as an existential supermarket is that no choice is taken very seriously, because a whole future of choices spreads endlessly before one, like a landscape without a horizon.

resentment is one of the worst states of mind, for it is like fatalism, except that it is without acceptance of the fate.

Choice as a good in itself, even as the only good in itself, is now almost an unthinking orthodoxy in the West, and affects everything from economic policy to medical ethics. Life is conceived as a vast supermarket

Apathy masquerading as tolerance will alternate with short periods of violent reaction.

They accept on authority that there is no authority: except, of course, what they themselves think, which is as good as what anyone else thinks. Intellectual weight is replaced by egotism.

If in principle you cannot found or ground any fact, or aesthetic or moral judgment, upon an indubitable, metaphysically certain premise that every rational being must accept and cannot but accept without falling into self-evident contradiction, then it follows that all facts and judgments are without secure foundation and therefore are vulnerable to criticism.

we show ourselves so intimidated by a few treacherous mullahs in Denmark that Mohammed and his legacy can no longer be mocked, derided, excoriated, or rationally criticized in public, and pass laws to preserve sensitive bigots from hurt feelings, we have only ourselves to blame if the most extreme and retrograde forms of the religion-triumph in the minds of the young and impressionable.

Moslems will not make many valuable contributions to intellectual or cultural life until their brightest people turn their intelligence to something other than supposed exegesis of supposedly infallible texts.

instigates violence between young men, especially between those young men whose social status is dependent entirely upon the possession of a woman (or women), their status in all other respects being lowly because their accomplishments and economic prospects are lowly.

Hypocrisy and dissimulation are what keeps social systems strong; it is intellectual honesty that destroys them.

Fanaticism is resentment in search of power; consumerism is apathy in search of happiness.