Victorian "Darker" Novels

Anthony Trollope is the author of the much-loved Barchester novels, about the sweetie-pie Rev. Septimus Harding, cello player, and his bumptious son-in-law, Archdeacon Grantly. And of course he wrote the Palliser novels about another rather sweetie-pie character, Plantaganet Palliser, and his decimal coinage plan for Britain.

In these novels Trollope examined the rights and wrongs of Britain through the lens of comedy.

But there are darker novels, which really take a whack at British society. I am thinking of The Way We Live Now, featuring really nasty characters like the swindler, and probably Jewish, Augustus Melmotte and the worthless young Sir Felix Carbury.

Or The American Senator, in which Trollope cunningly uses a pompous American US Senator to illuminate many unjust corners of British life. But it's all perfectly harmless, because, ha ha, how can you take offence when it's a blow-hard American Senator complaining about Britain!

Or the harrowing Linda Tressel. It is set in Nuremberg, and is about a young 21 year-old girl raised by her super-religious aunt, who decides one fine day that Linda is to marry her long-time 50-year-old lodger. The aunt puts enormous moral and religious pressure on Linda to agree to the marriage so that eventually Linda runs away, gets sick and dies. Again, perfectly harmless, because we are talking about those crazy Germans in Nuremberg. Could such a thing happen in Britain? Never mind.

We all like to criticize Charles Dickens for his overdrawn gargoyles. But maybe there was a method to the madness, that we could happily ignore the brutal reality of life in Dickensian London because his characters were so over the top. Truth is that, compared to the nice comfortable world of middle-class novel readers, life was nasty, brutish and short for most people back in those days.

And don't get me started on Thomas Hardy. His novels are full of the darkness of life, from Jude the Obscure to Far From the Madding Crowd to Tess of the Durbervilles. Then there is The Well-Beloved that is so dark I could not finish it.

But whatabout today's writers? Why am I not engaged in their critiques of society? Maybe it's because I think that, e.g., Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale is rather missing the point. Yes, there might be a time where eevil white Christian men are breeding with handmaid concubines, but I think we could rather go to work on the manifold hypocrisies of our present educated Gentry in religion, in culture, in sexuality, in politics before we get to work on crazy Christian bigots. On the other hand, when Atwood is writing about university culture in Life Before Man, she nails it. 

Somehow, with Tom Wolfe dead, there seems to be nobody around to pick up the torch of satirical social analysis.

(I except, of course, my own daughter, the writer Beatriz Williams, whose oeuvre is a magnificent critique of modern society, but done more in the Victorian style of suggestion rather than modern wokie bludgeon.)

Maybe our modern world will be rescued by Chinese writers. Whatabout Kevin Kwan, of Crazy Rich Asians, a delicious romp that dances around the hole in the middle of crazy rich life? Or the excellent Liu Cixin, whose sci-fi Three Body Problem series goes as deep into modern problems as anyone could wish?

Strictly speaking, what with the current wokie ban on all social critique that goes anywhere near the Holy Sanctuary of left-wing culture there ought to be a burgeoning satirical literature that goes just up to the boundary of canceling, but no further. I suppose if I were younger I would know all about it. There is, after all, an eternal yearning in the young to poke at the hypocrisies of their elders and teach them a lesson.

Instead, I am perfectly happy to twaddle around with Trollope and Hardy. And, of course, My Girl George Eliot.

Meanwhile I am chugging through Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit, written in 1843. Young Martin has just arrived in New York City and is getting to experience its splendid newspapers, from the New York Sewer to the New York Stabber to the New York Peeper, including "the Sewer's exclusive account of a flagrant act of dishonesty committed by the Secretary of State when he was eight years old; now communicated, at a great expense, by his own nurse." 

Golly. You mean to say that digging up a politician's past goes all the way back to the 19th century? That the practice of digging up dirt on Supreme Court nominees is old hat? "I literally can't even." As the ladies say.

Taleb's Three Layers of "Skin in the Game"

The best-selling writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb is from what he calls "the Levant." That is, I suppose, to remind us that the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean has been a sophisticated trading culture since whenever. Those were the days when Beirut was considered the Paris of the Levant. Alas, no more and so the refugees from the Levant are all over. There is Taleb in New York, and there is Mexican cellphone magnate and New York Times owner Carlos Slim. And many more.

Taleb worked for 23 years as a financial trader, and made the big time with his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. The idea was that every now and again a big event occurs that wipes out everyone's expectations. We all expect minor changes in the world, but from time to time a tidal wave obliterates everything. So, he argued, you need to keep that Black Swan event in mind. What would happen to your life and your fortune -- never mind your sacred honor -- if the unexpected happened?

Now he has written Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, the notion that you can't trust people that don't have skin in the game. But tucked away in the book is a three layer table on page 47 labeled "Appendix: Asymmetries in Life and Things." Three Layers? That's where I live.

Taleb's first layer is "No Skin in the Game," meaning the guy that "keeps upside, transfers downside to others, owns a hidden option at someone else's expense."  This includes bureaucrats, consultants, large corporations, scientists "who play the system," centralized government, politicians, bankers. In other words we are talking about a person that

Seeks awards, prizes, honors, ceremonies, medals, tea with the Queen of England, membership in academies, handshake with Obama.

The second layer is "Skin in the Game," meaning the guy that "keeps his own downside, takes his or her own risk." this includes citizens, merchants, businessmen, artisans, laboratory and field experimenters, governments of city states, writers, speculators, activists, hedge fund traders.

The third layer is "Skin in the Game of Others, or Soul in the Game," meaning the guy that "takes the downside on behalf of others, or for universal values," This includes saints, knights, warriors, soldiers, prophets, philosophers (old-time), artists, innovators, maverick scientists, municipal government, "journalists who take risks and expose frauds," activists, dissidents and revolutionaries. in other words the kind of person for whom

Highest -- even only -- award is death for one's ideas or positions: Socrates, Jesus, Saint Catherine, Hypatia, Joan of Arc.

 Of course this is quite a bit different from my reductive Three Peoples theory -- with its Subordinates, Responsibles, and Creatives -- and Curtis Yarvin's Three Layers, with its Clients, Commoners, and Gentry. That's because all three layers of Taleb's Asymmetries refer to my Creative class or Yarvin's Gentry layer.

Still, you can see that the No Skinners are rather like my Subordinates, especially when you read Taleb basically calling them suck-ups, wanting tea with the Queen, etc. And the regular Skin in the Gamers are like my Responsibles: they don't expect other people to pick up their garbage. The highest and best layer, the Soul in the Gamers, are clearly like the Jungian ideal of the Sacrificial Hero, who gives his life that others may live.

Actually, I'd say that Taleb makes an important point:. In every sector of society, from high to low, there are Subordinate Clients who expect to live without having to suck it in on the downside; there are Responsible Commoners, that willingly take the risk of caring for them and theirs; and there are the Creative Heroes, that put their life on the line that others may live.

One thing I would add, because of my notion of Activism Culture. There are a lot of fake Sacrificial Heroes out there. That is why I say that activists are "play-acting revolution." They know that the activist that gives his life for others is the highest kind of person. But if you play-act the Sacrificial Hero then you ain't.

The Accumulation of Liberal Follies

So, today President Trump's nominee for Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett, is up before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

And, as they say, it is another high-stakes nomination battle, because for liberals everything is hanging in the balance, including abortion and homosexual marriage.

Do you understand, liberals, why having the Supreme Court legislate from the bench is a very bad strategic idea, however cool it may seem from a tactical standpoint?

Do you see how it is rather a bad idea to impose your moral agenda with a Supreme Court majority and then find yourself desperate to maintain that majority by fair means or foul a generation down the road?

No, I didn't think you did.

My standard illustration of this is the Washington State initiative process. Back in the Eighties, if you can believe it, Washington State had a vocal religions right movement that put an initiative on the ballot to restrict abortions. The initiative went down to defeat, and abortion has not been heard from since then in Washington State. Because a vote of the people is dispositive.

It is telling that a cult of personality has grown up around the career of the departed Justice Ginsburg. Really? A cult of personality around a judge? It is telling because in the Anglo-American tradition a judge is a deadly boring crosser of "t"s and dotter of "i"s. Judgeology is about comparing two pieces of legislation and determining how to deal with the contradictions between them. Or about evaluating a piece of legislation in view of the dictates of the Constitution.

Of course, the educated elite always has an inside track in the judiciary. That is understood. But when the educated elite acting through the judiciary imposes its cultural will on the rest of the nation, that is not good.

The point is that when you want to change the law on abortion you need to persuade the nation. Now my belief is that there are two things to consider on abortion. The first is how far the criminal law should go. Is it OK to terminate the life of a newborn child? Nearly everyone will say No. Is it OK to take a drug in the first month of pregnancy to cause a spontaneous abortion? Nearly everyone will say OK.

But whatabout abortion as a moral question? I'd guess that a lot more people would be queasy about abortion as a moral question than as a criminal question.

That is why we have a separation of church and state. The state is all about what we will oppose with police and judges and jailers. The church is all about voluntary moral communities that say Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not, but without the police and judges and jailers to back it up.

As a profound sexist I say that the criminal law is a boy thing: police with nightsticks, judges with the power to send you to jail, jails with doors clanging shut on your freedom. And I say that the moral law is a girl thing, with its naming and shaming and shunning, the "I can't believe she did that," or "Much as I hate to say it..." or "I can't even!" with which women dispose of each other in the community of women.

But I realize that we are a country mile away from my liberal neighbors having even a glimpse of a view of all this. They believe the liberal Zeitgeist and that's all. For them, RBG is a cult figure, because. And, of course, there is the perceived need of a professional woman to control her fertility. If you have a career, you plan your family to fit in with your career trajectory.

But whatabout non-professional women that don't feel the need to control their fertility, that would prefer a moral framework where everyone from husbands to society at large is morally and physically committed to raising every child conceived?

So, the moralization of the Supreme Court is just one in a growing avalanche of liberal errors, liberal conceits, liberal follies, the belief that you can actually plan society like a garden.

I believe that life is much more like cleaning up after mistakes, and that the sooner you realize you made a mistake, the better.

But in real life, as Anthony Trollope shows in his short novel Linda Tressel, the last thing people are willing to do is recognize they made a mistake. Especially when they have strong religious and/or ideological beliefs.

And when you push ahead with your religious or ideological agenda and damn the torpedoes, the only question becomes how big the butcher's bill will be.

Yes, Even the President is Expendable

One of the problems of today's public square is that its conventional wisdom takes for granted the feminine notion of protection.

Victor Davis Hanson demonstrates this in a piece about Trump. The president should not be cowering in basements or masked up to the nines.

It is leadership to go out and, with proper caution, to brave the contagion, on the theory Trump is indeed replaceable while cowering is inexcusable.

Yeah, guess what. There is an Amendment in the Constitution all about presidential succession. If Trump dies, the Vice President becomes president. President Trump is expendable.

That is what various characters opine about in Shakespeare. There is Worcester, in Henry IV Part One. Says he to King Henry IV,

It was myself, my brother and his son,
That brought you home and boldly did outdare
The dangers of the time.

 Then, of course there is the famous speech of the young Henry V at Harfleur:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;

In your average Napoleonic War novel, you run up against the "Forlorn Hope," the volunteers that swarm through the breach in the city walls of the enemy, facing almost certain death as they try to take the city by storm.

The basic fact about being a man is that you are expendable, and you are expected to risk your life as a leader of men or a follower, because Job One of a man is to demonstrate courage. Honor among men is about courage, the willingness to be expended.

But the basic fact of being a woman is that you carry the future within you. You need to stay alive, because it is women that bring forth the future. Thus for women, honor is chastity, doing the proper thing. You do the right thing and your kids survive.

In the old days, it was exclusively men that populated the public square, men that died for their country, men that operated in the culture of courage and fought anyone that dared to question their courage. And women operated exclusively in the domestic sphere, nurturing and "keeping the kids alive."

But when women came into the public square they brought their culture of safety with them. And as women have propagated into administrative positions throughout government and education they have transformed the culture from a culture of courage to a culture of safety.

This is how to understand the current concern about "microaggressions" and "safe spaces." It is the women's culture of safety modifying the public square to "suit a more feminine sensibility."

That is why the world's response to the COVID epidemic has gone so solidly for lockdowns and masks. Because women expect to be protected; they instinctively "shelter in place."

But, of course, for every woman that gets to shelter in place, someone else has to boldly outdare the dangers of the time.

Now it is my contention that almost all women are incapable of understanding anything other than their culture of safety. I talked with a nice liberal lady with a gubmint job down the street here in liberal North Seattle, and she expressed how glad she was that our Democratic Governor Jay Inslee was insisting on a tight lockdown. She has #WeBelieve and Black Lives Matter yardsigns at her house. She seems to have no clue that there are millions of people suffering extreme disruption to their lives so that she can live in North Seattle safety behind her social-moralizing yardsigns. She has no clue about this.

And, of course, the whole feminist culture maintains the innocence and helplessness of women. We saw this with the covering for the rather unimpressive debate performance of Sen. Harris (D-CA). It's sexist to interrupt her. It's mansplaining to disagree with her. Of course, because women expect to be protected.

So much for Here Me Roar.

I think that we now know that the lockdowns were a mistake. The school closures were a mistake. we should have done everything possible to protect senior citizens and other vulnerable people, but everyone else should have gone about their business. To say, as Gov. Cuomo did, that "if everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy” is rubbish. That is not how the world works. 

But it is how women's minds work. And the modern politician has to cater to women and their expectation of protection.

It will be interesting to see how President Trump's bravely outdaring the dangers of the time works for him in the remaining weeks of the presidential campaign.

Do women voters conclude that he has been protecting them by getting COVID and recovering? Or do they decide that he has put them at risk?

Honestly, I don't know. All I can do is listen to the women I know and wait for their judgements.

Race, Identity, and Innocence

According to Shelby Steele, a black intellectual whose father was a black truck driver and whose mother was a white social worker, the whole racism thing is about innocence.

That's what Samuel Kronen writes in "The Prescience of Shelby Steele."

It all started after the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.

In Steele’s view, the explanation of black underachievement has its origins in the moral fall from grace of the 1960s when racism was first stigmatized out of polite society. For the first time, a critical mass of whites became conscious of their historic privilege and complicity in racism in ways that transformed the larger culture, while a critical mass of blacks came to identify with their historic victimization. 

You gotta admit, it's pretty weird. Instead of feeling good that we put the past of legal discrimination behind us, in a remarkable First in human history, we feel guilty about our past.

Oh wait a minute. Of course we do. Guilt is especially a girl thing, arising out of the woman's experience of honor-as-chastity. And since no woman is really as chaste as she wishes she were...

Ever since, both whites and blacks have developed unconscious patterns to guard their sense of racial innocence. A significant strand of white American culture projects a sense of guilt about the plight of blacks to dissociate themselves from the stigma of racism, and a significant strand of black American culture compels an angry militant pose to win concessions from white society and dissociate from the stigma of inferiority.

Ahem. Not quite, Sammy. Let's put it slightly differently. 

The end-all-and-be-all of white liberal culture is to maintain their white liberal innocence and heroism on the race question and damn the rest of the whites to bottomless perdition, there to dwell in adamantine chains who durst defy th'Omnipotent [educated Gentry] to arms. The beginning and the end of liberal self-image his their heroic stand on racial justice.

That is what all those Black Lives Matter signs are doing all over my upscale liberal neighborhood.  It's not just about innocence. It's about being Saved. Yes. We glorious wokie liberals are Saved, because we have been to racial confession and have been absolved of our sins. Aren't we special!

Now, in my book a culture of innocence is a political thing. If you are organized for political combat you need to develop a culture of innocence to give you permission to do all the dirty deeds that come naturally in any human conflict, and especially in political conflict.

For instance, after World War I the Germans developed a culture of innocence around the Dolchstoßlegende, the stab-in-the-back myth, that the German Army had not lost the war but had been betrayed by the civilians back home, Jews and republicans, and the like.

I maintain that any small minority will develop this culture of innocence to give itself the courage to fight in the political arena.

You will notice that in the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative beloved by our wokey friends, the "allies" are obviously a small minority of enlightened and educated people innocent of the racial guilt of the "white oppressors" and blessed with the evolved wisdom to save the "oppressed peoples" from the systemic white racism of the "white oppressors." So they are the saved, the lucky ones.

And so blacks need their culture of innocence, as Kronen writes, to deal with "the stigma of inferiority."

But whatabout our liberal friends. Whatabout their culture of innocence?

Hmm. It must be because they do not experience themselves as conquering heroes, but as an embattled minority, the few, the proud, the Marines -- of noble progressivism.

So they have to maintain an culture of innocence, to purge the guilt of the nasty stuff they do to the rest of the white community.

When Government Screws Up: Skid Row Syndrome

When the economy goes south, the result is very often a Skid Row, that Seattle claims for its Yesler Way that was once a hill down which loggers skidded logs down to waiting ships.

But now Skid Row refers to a district where unattached men spend useless lives eking out an existence in cheap flophouses and drink. Only now it's homeless shelters and drugs.

Skid Rows were notable in the Fifties, as the haunts of men thrown out of society by the Great Depression. Then in the 1980s Democrats made a big thing about the "homeless" resulting from Reaganomics -- but probably the economic disruptions of the 1970s when the Good Union Jobs of the Fifties got hammered by the rise of Japan Inc. and inflation changed the terms of trade for millions.

Obviously the Great Recession of 2006-08 resulted in another surge of homeless and people were thrown out of work by the unwinding of the real-estate bubble financed by liar loans and Fannie/Freddie.

And now the forced lockdowns of the COVID era are tumbling another generation of the marginal onto the streets.

Mostly, of course, these people that have fallen out of society are men. That is because, I assume, women are coded to find shelter: somewhere, somehow, they have someone that will give them a roof over their heads. Whereas men... yes what is it about men that they spiral out of the social structure and end up on the street, or living in a Hooverville, or Skid Row, or a homeless encampment around Seattle's Green Lake?

In part, these recurrent crises are the result of the constant economic revolution of the capitalist era: the textile revolution, the steam revolution, the steel revolution, the electric revolution, the auto revolution, the computer revolution, the internet revolution. All these revolutions tended to transform the labor market for men, and it seems that some men aren't very good at picking up new skills and reinventing their working lives.

But a lot of the problem has been government. Let's leave aside the economic impact of wars, which goes without saying. But we can say this:

• The Great Depression of the 1870s was the result of government deflation getting the dollar back to its pre-civil war parity. A lot of unions got started in the 1870s; I'm not sure how much good they did.
• The Great Depression of the 1930s was the result of government deflation after WWI leading eventually to a big stock-market bubble and government failure to act as lender of last resort in the subsequent credit crisis.
• The 1980s homeless crisis was probably a result of the Reagan administration fighting the 1970s inflation. You can call this Reagan cruelty or 1970s inflationary stupidity. Take your pick.
• The Great Recession of 2006-08 was the result of the government encouraging home loans to people that weren't creditworthy and whose loans weren't properly collateralized. All intended to help minority homeowners who were then hardest hit in the subsequent housing crash. And then Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, failed to act as lender of last resort in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Oh Ben!
• The homeless crisis of 2020 was caused by government lockdowns to prevent the spread of the COVID-10 virus that particularly impacted low-skilled workers that couldn't "work at home."

Let's admit that, from time to time, we moderns are going to experience economic dislocations in which marginal men will be hardest hit.

What is our 5-point plan for dealing with this recurrent problem?

Because right now, dealing with the problem of dysfunctional men is the last thing on the political agenda of our noble educated Gentry. To President Obama they were "bitter clingers." To Hillary Clinton they were "deplorables." To the wokerati they are "white supremacists."

See, I think that we've got our priorities completely backwards. I think that nine times out of ten women are pretty good at accessing the help that societies deal out. But men are too proud or too stupid to ask for help. They would rather molder away in drink and drugs than admit they have a problem.

And that has clearly been going on for hundreds of years, from the vagabonds and beggars of England in 1500 to the "waste population" that the Brits wanted to ship off to North America in 1600 and Australia in 1800, to the Captain Swing rioters in England right after the Napoleonic Wars, to the workhouse surplus population of the Dickens era, to the "shell-shock" victims of World War I and the "combat fatigue" of World War II and the PTSD of our current era.

Got any brilliant ideas? I certainly don't.

Rebuilding "The Meaning of Life" with 26-year-olds

Everybody is talking about religion. Or not. But whatever they are talking about we are all still concerned about Douglas Adams' recurring theme in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

On the one hand, as I wrote last week, we have our lefty friends with their Original Sin of "systemic racism" and their Apocalypse that global warming that will mean the End of the World unless we act now.

On the other, we have the experience of a young woman acquaintance who found, after her traumatic brain injury, that she couldn't experience God and the divine any more. But slowly, that sensitive part of her brain is coming back.

On the other we have another acquaintance who notes that "The words superstition and religion are synonyms.  Yet everyone claims one and not the other." Whatever I believe it is the truth, and what the other guys believe is a lie.

Then we have the Zman today writing about the "aridity of the intellectual landscape."

Modern conservatives operate in the lowest tier of intellectual discourse, which is the practical. This is where they debate where to move commas around the tax code and how to tinker with existing structures. The Left operates at the next tier, which focuses on the process. For them, the administrative state is one item in the toolkit they have in the war on the general culture.

But what comes next?

[Conservatism] should be the engine producing a new moral and political paradigm to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, but instead it is just an obstacle in the way of that process. This is why it has collapsed and is headed to the ash heap of history.

While Trump and the people around him are oblivious to his role in this historical period, their anti-intellectualism is the necessary agent to break the old dynamic. Conservatives have no answer for his blunt observations and the Left has had its skin peeled back to reveal its reptilian interior. Trump has been a clarifying event, one that will usher conservatism off the intellectual and political stage. What replaces it is something suited for the demographic age.

Yes, but what? Well, here is  Austin Schue, "a 26-year-old American, working-class college dropout who owns and operates a small business" in northern California. Who has read a book. Who has actually had an original thought. Who can actually write an article. And he is writing about his life journey -- on several levels.

He is writing about the necessity of earning a living. And he is talking of the necessity of a meaningful life. And this young man has actually read Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning.

In my private reading, I noticed that the heroes of my favorite books acted on the truth in accordance with their belief systems—as in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, wherein protagonist R.P. McMurphy is lobotomized after he attempts to liberate his fellow insane-asylum inmates from the tyrannical regime of Nurse Ratched. I heard echoes of Christianity, my past faith, in his sacrifice.

He observed the contradictions in the left wing message.

On one hand, they pushed a feminized and pacifistic ideal of society. Yet at the same time, they glorified any kind of violent resistance that presented itself as progressive—a pattern we’ve seen play out in spades over recent months.

How come I didn't think of writing that? 

So what did he do? He learned to become a farrier, shoeing horses! And "ran a brush-clearing and landscaping company as a side hustle." But what about the meaning of life?

As a straight white male, I was supposedly luxuriating in a life of privilege—a stereotype that had nothing to do with my experience as a blue-collar worker who’d faced debilitating family traumas. What I really wanted to do was forge a coherent centrist viewpoint—one that can accommodate personal responsibility, the search for truth, sincere compassion for the less fortunate, and a sensible commitment to preserving the Earth’s ecosystems.

 Remember, this guy is 26. Then he began listening to Joe Rogan's podcast. And his lefty girl-friend found out about Jordan B. Peterson.

I was particularly blown away by the depth of Dr. Peterson’s knowledge, and the way he coherently tied together ideas from psychology, history, evolutionary biology, neuroanatomy, and myth.

Exactly. Peterson is trying to construct a new "meaning of life" from all our knowledge, ancient and modern. 

I started exploring his writing. This is the way children feel when they first hear a kind of music that resonates deeply. It was my intellectual Led Zeppelin. Like many of Peterson’s other fans, I implemented his lessons in my own life, and became a more responsible and assertive entrepreneur as a result.

Yes, the world is falling apart like a toxic marriage.

[Yet] most people I meet in the world just smile and say hello, even with a mask on. They seem to find life tolerable and even enjoyable. I see people going out to fish or mountain bike. I see tradesmen hustling. The healthiest people are the ones who picked a real tangible goal in their own life, and are working toward it.

Engaging in that process saves lives. It certainly saved my life. And while it may be too late for my relative, it’s not too late for members of my own generation. Clean your room. Build a house. Shoe a horse. It doesn’t matter what you do, so long as you aspire to something other than burning down somebody else’s prosperity and happiness.

May I suggest that if there are young men like Austin Shue in the world, then we may concur with George Eliot in Middlemarch, that

the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

As everybody understands, we need to conjure up a new "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" in the face of an old order that stumbles along, using its power and its domination to keep the old order going, just one more cycle.

It is good to know that good people are working on it.