Poems are structures with strict forms that shine all by themselves. Very often, they do not communicate a message. Poems are magical ceremonies of language.

Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals

We have abandoned the playfulness of language because overheated neoliberal egos accept no other object of worship than the perennially wounded, aggrieved, underfed self. If a toddler’s mother gets distracted, the child perceives this as a threat to her very survival. Only the mother’s constant, kind, loving attention makes the world less cruel and terrifying. Gradually, the child learns to do for herself, and eventually displaces her mother’s attention with her own as the main guarantee of well-being.

A neoliberal self never grows up. If it did, how could it adopt constant changeability and malleability that are the only marker of neoliberal morality? The clamoring infantile self perceives as a mortal wound any distraction of the attention of others. Such an individual has no inner core to which he could retract. He doesn’t exist if he can’t see himself, or rather, the wounds that constitute his self, in others. We’ve all seen this phenomenon in free Palestiners who appear under every social media post to berate posters for discussing something other than the Palestinian issue. [Cue Free Palestiners who will respond to this post with rants about their favorite psychic wound, remaining utterly unconscious of how they embody the exact issue I am discussing.] Or in activists who make everybody recite land acknowledgments at all sorts of unrelated events.

Playful language is as bound to wound somebody’s sensibilities in the world of overinflated egos as an umbrella is to poke a passenger in an overstuffed subway car. Speech codes that have proliferated today to the extent that would have shocked the strictest medieval Torquemada are the result of this bellowing, suppurating narcissism.

I think best in dialogic form. When people ask questions, offer their perspective, and suggest venues of analysis, that really helps me figure out my own ideas. Unfortunately, the kind of teaching that I do precludes any dialogue about the ideas that interest me. So I created this blog, and it’s literally the most useful tool I have found to advance my intellectual development. I’m grateful to everybody who is participating because I’m a slow, plodding thinker, and I need a lot of repetition and looking at things from different perspectives to arrive at complete ideas.

When I’m stuck in my writing, which is at least every other day, I write something on here, and it always pushes me along to where I need to be.

The whole point of the blog for me is to share what I read and think about and receive feedback. I read voraciously in many different directions. I need complete freedom to look at all sorts of ideas, try them on, discard, adopt, modify, and so on. I don’t have another place to do it other than this blog. Life isn’t worth much to me if I can’t read, think and discuss. This sounds like a big statement but I’m completely sincere. I need this like I need to breathe air.

Many people over the years have found value in hearing what I have to say on here. Some found books to read, discovered favorite authors, sharpened their rhetorical skills, consolidated their system of arguments, or simply found a way to have fun, enjoy, relax, and have a chuckle. I think it can be very useful to witness a person’s intellectual journey as it happens and see what goes into making ideas. If Zygmunt Bauman, for example, had a blog where I could see how he arrived at his ideas, that would be fascinating to me. Obviously, I lay no claim to being at the level of Bauman but I believe there’s value in observing a regular person, a mom, who packs lunch boxes, makes PB&J sandwiches, and decorates the dining room table with fluffy bunnies, read and then create philosophy.

I’m very attached to long-time readers who, to me, are more close and real than most people I know in my daily life. But this is a relationship that has to be honest and free if it is to have any meaning. I’m not going to censor myself because then what’s the point? We have to accept collectively and individually that pursuing the life of the mind isn’t always all flowers and butterflies. It’s akin to crashing through the thick forest undergrowth, leaving flaps of skin and drops of blood on thorny branches.

Trump approval numbers:

Young people seem to have been more fed up than anybody expected by the pious officiants of the self-righteous cult vanquished by Trump.

I also want to share Byung-Chul Han’s observations about tattoos.

Traditionally, tattoos meant belonging to a community and a hierarchy. Army tats, for instance. Or prison tats. They inscribe you into an existing order.

But for a neoliberal subject, tattoos are about expressing that all-important authentic self. They have no symbolic power because a symbol has to relate to something outside of the self.

“The neoliberal hell of the same is populated with tattooed clones,” says the philosopher. “Everyone carries their own private space wherever they go.” But instead of retreating into that private space when the public life becomes a bit too much, people turn their private spaces towards the world, and we are left with a bunch of competing private spaces and nothing remotely like an actual public space.

I hope people understand that this isn’t a dig at individuals with tattoos. This is about how all of us relate to the world. We are all neoliberal subjects. Nobody is a very special cookie who is immune. To the contrary, the need to be a very special cookie is the most neoliberal thing in existence.

Byung-Chul Han makes it clear that rituals and depression are incompatible. Rituals, he says, relate us to the world. They distract us from our selves, and that unburdens us and makes life lighter. An excessive fixation on the self is a depression-causing trap. Rituals also protect us from the most painful, caustic effects of raw emotion.

In Paul Murray’s novel The Bee Sting, characters become obsessed with discovering and revealing to themselves the most authentic way of being. They turn into closed down systems that are constantly trying to figure out who they really are. In such an exercise, the self is ceaselessly trying to produce itself. That makes all of these characters miserable. They thought that circling down the deep drain of their inner life in hopes of reaching its ever elusive center is what freedom was about. In reality, this was worse than any jail.

Nobody (sane) is saying the 25-year-old DOGE staffer's whole life needs to be ruined, only that they lack the professionalism to be a high-level government staffer. There are plenty of other jobs out there. This isn't DEI for racist posting.

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) February 7, 2025

Richard Levine and Sam Brinton are begging to disagree with the professionalism part.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett and too many Democrat politicians, officials, and staffers for me to list here beg to disagree on the DEI for racist posting part.

https://twitter.com/TxWiseacres/status/1888328323358474421?t=KSjtfjNKeDwGeCQXP-oJ8w&s=19

This is as unacceptable and dangerous as if the teacher performed root canals on these kids during recess. She absolutely should be fired and never work in education again.

At my university we are routinely pushed to act as homegrown psychotherapists to students, and nobody except for me seems to understand that it’s not OK. We are told that it’s a sign of empathy to want to help people in psychological distress. As Byung-Chul Han says, appeals to empathy are used to exploit us and wring out of additional work beyond our contractual obligations.

https://twitter.com/Valen10Francois/status/1888229692077162927?t=cbuUwIffWeDNOUBtqB4JTg&s=19

I’m starting to get really fed up with this dude:

Every high school senior should pass the same civics test that we require of every naturalized citizen. This shouldn’t be controversial.

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) February 7, 2025

This feeds directly into the pernicious “everybody is an immigrant” narrative, and why do we need this on our side when there’s enough of it on the other?

Also, what do we do with those who don’t pass? Strip away their citizenship and bring over better quality people? I fail to see the difference and the attitude of every open border fanatic out there.

I expressed an opinion on social media that Governor Pritzker is not a good governor, and immediately an overheated Democrat showed up to tell me that I shouldn’t have opinions since I wasn’t born here. It’s hilarious that the only time I hear that I should shut up because I’m an immigrant is when I talk to Democrats. The only immigrants they like keep silent while cleaning the toilet and mowing the lawn. Mouthy, opinionated immigrants offend their sensibilities because we don’t need to be rescued and patronized.

In any case, here is my springtime decor which is consoling me for the silliness of engaging with fanatical Pritzker supporters.