One thing that I feel explains not only a great deal of why so many well-meaning young people fail to grasp the nature of the world around them, but also why so much American political discourse is utterly useless: Americans simply cannot do anything like a materialist analysis of current events.
Read MoreWhenever considering a system of categorization, some categories are marked: they’re stated and described. Others can’t be. Some categories are unmarked because they are unknown: this disease hasn’t been witnessed before, we’re still trying to figure out what it is. Still others are unmarked because they’re what the others are a deviation from: consider, there are ten thousand thousand different maladies and diseases in the world; how many kinds of health are there? Consider, also, the Anna Kareinina principle, articulated by Tolstoy: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
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