The metal thing holding the leaves of my mind together

Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies. The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic system. The [...]

It’s spooky to consider, us turning teeth into gold and gold into eyeballs. Things in life is either flesh or money, like they can’t be both at the same time. That would be like somebody being both alive and dead. You can’t. You got to choose. –Chuck Palahniuk, 2007

Liberal writers such as Ronald Dworkin invite us to see the Supreme Court’s function as that of invoking a set of consistent principles, most and perhaps all of them of moral import, in the light of which particular laws and particular decisions are to be evaluated. Those who hold such a view are bound to [...]

A living tradition then is an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the good which constitute that tradition. Within a tradition the pursuit of goods extends through generations, sometimes through many generations. Hence the individual’s search for his or her own good is generally and characteristically conducted within a [...]

…man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am I [...]