I love giving talks to the retiree crowd. Today, at the Ukrainian talk du jour where I wasn’t the speaker but more of a question answerer, an older woman came up to ask what Russia’s goals in Ukraine are.

“Do they want to take over and rule it themselves?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “They only want to destroy. It’s blind rage and destruction. Violence for its own sake.”

She struggled with it for a bit but then her face lit up.

“So, it’s like our BLM?” she said. “OK, now I get it.”

I have this weird physiological condition where my eyes start to close when I’m bored. They literally can’t stay open and I have to hold them open with fingers. Since I’m only ever bored when I talk to people, this is very embarrassing.

The moment the conversation stops being boring (which is rare), my eyes pop right open.

My husband doesn’t believe me because he’s never around when it happens. Or rather, it doesn’t happen when he’s around.

Another great question. What is it today with all the great questions?

OK, so what is a solution? If you have a major, persistent problem in your life, how do you solve it?

I don’t know anything about your life so let’s use mine as an example of problem-solving. I left my first husband when I was 22. For the next 9 years, I dated. A lot. But every relationship I entered followed the exact same pattern that I’d had with my ex-husband. I chose men of different nationalities, languages, age groups, etc. But the result was always identical. It was so identical that it would actually be funny if it weren’t so pathetic. I blamed the men – they are bad, they are low-quality. I blamed my bad luck. The actual problem was obvious to everybody around me except for me because I didn’t want to name the actual problem.

Then I finally got over myself and diagnosed the actual issue. I confessed to myself that I needed to replay my first marriage in miniature. This was a powerful need that I had, so I kept engineering these situations with a blind dedication.

Once I correctly named the problem, it was gone. I almost immediately met N and we have had a completely different kind of relationship for 17 years and counting.

Correctly naming the problem is the solution. If you are stating what the problem is and the solution doesn’t materialize, it means you haven’t yet named it right.

Look at what people do in AA, for example. They go to meetings where they repeat, “hi, my name is Johnny, and I’m an alcoholic.” Then they talk about what alcohol means to them, and that’s how they solve their problem of alcoholism.

Even in terms of an individual life, solving a persistent problem is extremely hard because the brain loves nothing more than the status quo. It will throw up all sorts of defences to prevent you from seeing the actual problem. “I’m lazy, I’m not good at this, society oppresses me, etc.” This becomes even harder at the level of society where, barring a deeply traumatic collective experience, you’ll have millions of people putting up defences to avoid seeing the truth.

We don’t want a traumatic collective event here in America, so we’ll have to plow through patiently and for a long time before we can all name the problem and move away from it.

This is an excellent question.

Religion is about history and memory to an enormous extent. You need to go into a house of worship and feel connected to your great-great-grandmother who stood in the same kind of church and listened to the exact same service. Otherwise, you lose a gigantic part of what it’s supposed to be.

In American Orthodox churches the pews and the bright lights keep throwing me off because they are a nod to the ubiquitous Protestantism and not natural to how we practice Orthodoxy. But when I close my eyes, it’s like I’ve been hearing this same chant for hundreds of years. I feel connected to generations upon generations of my family. I feel their presence in myself.

I attended Catholic mass several times as part of learning about the Spanish culture. I attend Lutheran services regularly because my kid’s in a Lutheran school. I like them. They are all very nice. But I don’t feel anything in particular. In an Orthodox church, especially a real one without the blasted rows of pews, I feel everything.

And I don’t even need to be inside to feel it. During COVID lockdowns, I prowled around the church building because even just seeing the architecture plugs me in big time.

In Kevin Lambert’s novel Querelle of Roberval, there is a character called Jézabel who is willingly and eagerly planning to end her family line of several generations of organized labor. The memory of workers demanding better working conditions will be erased, and it will take no violence or even expense to do so. Jézabel will self-immolate willingly. She will happily give up any hope of wealth accumulation because she has received something that she values more in return. She has received social approval to substitute wealth, family, children and future with a string of one-night stands. Yippee for her and this amazing feat of liberation:

Yes, she loves to screw someone from time to time, bringing home a guy or a girl at the end of her shift at the bar, but to commit to one person to the end of her days, that doesn’t interest her. She wants nothing to do with a shared bank account, a dog, children, all that stuff.

This is the niftiest trick that has been played on working-class Jézabels. They won’t procreate, so crowds of new citizens can be brought in as a substitute. They will very specifically be culled from places where there are no worker rights, so they won’t ask for much or even know that it is possible to have better working conditions. Selling this self-erasure to people as some sort of an extremely important freedom has been absolutely masterful. Hilariously but not unexpectedly, the people who have tricked Jézabel and Co into adopting this meaningless lifestyle that invariably leads to addiction, jail time and/or death don’t value this freedom much. They all have bank accounts, children, pets, and lots and lots of stuff that they can maintain while fleecing stupid, gullible Jézabels.

It’s easy to change your political affiliation when nothing much is at stake. It’s a lot harder to recognize that your whole professional life was a mistake when you are a leading ideologue of the Left, have committed a treasonous act for the cause of leftism, and led a friend to her death because of your political delusions. David Horowitz found the courage publicly to admit his complicity with these terrible acts and rebuild his life. His autobiography Radical Son tells about his journey with great simplicity and sincerity.

Horowitz grew up in the family of Jewish-American Stalinists, and the only departure from his parents’ ideology that he allowed himself was to withdraw support from the kind of leftism that supported totalitarian regimes. He thought it was possible to have a different kind of leftism but was eventually forced to recognize that totalitarianism was the only possible destination for these political beliefs.

The horror that Horowitz experienced when Black Panthers murdered a friend of his whom he sent to work for them was a turning point in his political life. He had to reevaluate his entire trajectory and free himself from the shackles of his unfortunate beliefs.

Alongside the story of his political evolution, Horowitz tells the equally fraught story of his personal life. When he stopped trying to be the savior of humanity and became a right-winger, he still couldn’t fully leave behind the savior mentality. Horowitz married a drug-addled prostitute and tried to improve her life. The prostitute robbed him blind for 7 years, and after there was nothing left to take, moved on to a fresh mark. Horowitz began to reevaluate his life and read his father’s diaries. That’s when he found out that his father had also married a drug-addled prostitute back in his youth and also wasted 7 years on trying to “cure” her. It’s fascinating how life works.

Great book, highly recommended. I found out so much about the New Left. Do read, you won’t be sorry.

There was a Russian couple at the Easter service today. When they heard me read the Gospel in Ukrainian (there’s a part of the service where people read in different languages), they left. These people, I’m telling you. Not only are they incapable of approaching a person and saying something human like “I’m so sorry, I hope your relatives are safe”, but they act like it’s our jets bombing their churches today when Orthodox Christians are at Easter service.

The number of times this happened, I can’t tell you. You’d think we are doing something to them, they act so insulted. But it’s one thing to walk out on a campus event and it’s a very different one to walk out on the most important Orthodox holy day.

Ultimately, this Russian couple spoiled their own Easter. I stayed and had a great time. And it’s a great metaphor for the entire history of Russia. They don’t want to participate because reality wounds them and then they blame everybody else for being excluded.

Horowitz mentions how when he became a conservative he noticed that people on the Right were unexpectedly tolerant of divergent viewpoints within conservatism. I’ve noticed this, too. I’ve disagreed with people in my signature intense way about all sorts of things. Trump, abortion, Israel, higher education. And people disagreed in return. Also very passionately. But that was it. The disagreement didn’t go any further. Nobody condemned me as a human being. Nobody accused me of wanting to murder anybody. Nobody diagnosed me with a something-phobia. Nobody said I can’t be a good person if I believe whatever it is I believe.

Also, something I noticed back when I was very much on the Left is that the more conservative people are, the likelier they are to ask questions. They are more curious about people because they accept that there’s more to a person than her political beliefs.

It feels deeply embarrassing, that’s how it feels. Over there, people are heroically fighting a war for national sovereignty while here crowds of pampered babies are throwing a tantrum and the whole world is trying to get them to take a pacifier and go beddie bye-bye.