Because understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand
yet another business book on the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books
Podcast, we commit to reading, dissecting and analyzing the great
books of the Western canon. You know, those
books from Jane Austen to Shakespeare and everything else in
between that you might have fallen asleep trying to read in
high school. We do this for our listeners, the owner, the
entrepreneur, the manager, or the civic leader who doesn't have the time
to read, dissect, analyze and leverage insights from
literature to execute leadership best practices in
the confusing and chaotic postmodern world we all now
inhabit. Welcome to the rescuing of Western
Civilization at the intersection of literature
and leadership. Welcome to the Leadership Lessons from
the Great Books Podcast. Hello, my name is
Hasan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons from
the Great Books podcast. Episode number
162
one of the responses, or one of the reactions
to the perception of unrealistic expectations around social
conformity is to adopt a pose,
adopt a posture of existential cynicism.
Cynicism and existential cynicism in particular,
influenced by French philosophical thought at the end of their national
cultural experience In World War II, is a
philosophy that proposes, quote individuals create their
own meaning and purpose in a fundamentally meaningless universe
and asserts that existence precedes
essence. As the 1950s
wore on, many intellects and elites in the west, led
around by the nose by writers like Albert Camus, Jean
Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, gradually began
infecting popular culture with a
disease that began with a clinical, cynical posture
towards stifling religious conformity and that would end
with the deconstruction of almost every form of meaning down to
identity. At the end of the 20th century,
our book, today a science fiction fix up novel,
opens in a way that initially seems hopeful but then gradually descends
into an existential confirmation of indeed a
fundamentally meaningless universe. It also stands
as a critique of militarism, the use of science, technology
and post war prosperity, as well as a sidelong
blow against the specter of the potential
for mid 20th century global thermonuclear
warfare. It is a book, a collection of
stories such as it were, that desperately wants the reader to
care enough about the fate of the earth and indeed places other than the
earth to save it, but also cynically
presumes that selfishness, greed, vanity and
existential dread leading to desperate failing action may be the
last best outcome for humanity in the
end. Today, on this episode of
the podcast, we will be introducing and discussing multiple themes
from the second book by this Author that we have covered on this
show, Ray Bradbury's the Martian
Chronicles leaders. The
era, the time for adopting a cynical
pose of carefully cultivated disinterest
and carefully cultivated insincerity has passed
here at the end of the fourth turning. The people,
the teams, the organizations, even the families and communities
you are leading are hungry
desperately so for you to actually
care.
And so we open today with
overview of the Martian Chronicles. So when you pick up this book,
the copy we have is of course published by Simon and Schuster. And
so because it is published by Simon and Schuster and the copyright is owned by
them, we will not be reading very much directly from,
from the book today. However, when you pick up this copy,
I have the unabridged version. You will see,
you will note that the way this book is set up
is written in a chronological form, starting in
at least the version I have, starting in January 1999 and going
to October 2026. And
Ray Bradbury is very clever in this. He opens the. The
book by framing the
exploration, the. The act of going
out into the stars. He begins to frame it as
a. As a philosophical act going along
with this idea of existential dread that we opened with. He
frames the scientific act of engaging with the
technology of rockets and of fuel and of men
and of machine, not as a scientific act, but as
a philosophical one. And you can see that in the
quote that opens up the Martian Chronicles.
It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher. Space
travel has again made children of us all.
But of course, there's a cynical, dark tone underlying all of that. Now,
the book opens in October, sorry not to remember January of
1999 with the idea of
a quote unquote rocket summer.
As you go through the years in the stories, some of them are
longer, some of them are shorter, some of them are written from the third
person, some of them are written from the second person. But what you
begin to see is that Bradbury is building an idea
of a world. He's building the idea of
a post war world where
conformity and hope run into, at least in
the first part of the book, run directly into
the. The exegesis of going to
another planet. A different, if we're
going to frame this in religious terms, a different eschatology,
a new heaven, as one of the characters says in the book,
leaving an old Earth. But of course, in going
to that new heaven, we take with
ourselves all of our old tendencies from
Earth and we seek to create a new Earth
that's remarkably like the old Earth in a
new or on a new heavenly body. Now, there are
some challenges with this in the first third, maybe, or not even the first
third first quarter of the Martian Chronicles,
Bradbury Dwell delves into an idea that is compelling, I
think, and we talked a little bit about it on the Stranger in the Strange
land episode, both 160 and
161. You should go back and listen to those episodes. The
introduction episode was 160 and then 161 is my
my long conversation, 2 hours and 45 minutes, almost 3 hours
with with John Hill, aka Small Mountain.
Recommend listening to that. But in going
through Stranger to Strange Land,
Robert Heinlein picks up on the idea that Ray
Bradbury proposes initially in Martian Chronicles. And
I'll talk about the publication schedule of these stories in a moment here
after the first bump. But here he talks about or he picks
up the idea that Bradbury initially proposes in these stories. And
the idea is this. It is the core idea in the first quarter of the
book. Mars is not uninhabited.
Mars is not a dead planet. There were
or there are civilizations on Mars in
Bradbury's conception, and those civilizations contain,
for better or worse, what we would call entities. And these
entities have their own conception of time. They have their
own conception of space. They have their own conception of reality
and value. And of course, just as
when Europeans journeyed across
the Atlantic Ocean transcontinentally and
showed up on the shores of the New World all the way
back now, 600 years ago almost,
and encountered Native Americans for the first time,
the same encountering, the same sort of cycle of
exploration, discovery, encountering
something that is foreign and new happens when,
when humans, specifically Americans, but
humans, climb in their rockets and jet
off to Mars, they discover that there is
a whole advanced society there, a whole advanced
society of folks that are watching
and waiting for them to land on their rockets,
climb out of their rockets and go,
well, go tromping around in their cities,
in their culture, and even,
even in their Martian canals.
Sam
so let's talk a little bit about the Martian Chronicles, a little
more about the Martian Chronicles. Let's explore a little bit more about that. So
this book was published in multiple parts and at different times.
It is what is known, according to Wikipedia, as a fix
up novel. From the Wikipedia article about the Martian
Chronicles, I quote, a fix up or fix up
dash or no dash is the way you write that term
is a novel created from several short fiction stories that may or may not
have been initially related or previously published.
The stories may be edited for consistency and sometimes New connecting material,
such as a frame story or other interstitial narration
is written for the new work. Close quote.
So how did Ray Bradbury, the author of Fahrenheit
451, which we've covered on the show, as I previously mentioned, the
author of Something Wicked this Way, Comes the Illustrated man,
and a number of other. A number of other classic
science fiction and. And fantasy writings in the mid
20th century. How did Bradbury come up with the Martian Chronicles?
Well, according to what we were able to research, he was inspired
by the work of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio,
which is a book about a collection of stories about a man who
returns to Widesburg, Ohio.
The stories in the Martian Chronicles appeared in various formats throughout the
1940s and, and on into the 1960s.
Several of these stories that were included in this
compiled book, this compiled edition,
eventually wound up showing up on as radio
shows, and eventually, I believe, a couple of them even
wound up on the Ray Bradbury Theater,
which premiered in the 1980s. Even
from Wikipedia, one more time, and I quote, the Martian Chronicles was written
as a chronicle. Each story presented as a chapter within an overall
chronological ordering of the plot. Overall, it can be viewed
as three extended episodes or parts punctuated by two
apocalyptic events. Events in the book's original
edition range from 1999 to 2026.
As 1999 approached in real life, the dates were advanced by
31 years in the 1997 edition.
Close quote. And that's the addition that we have on our show. On
our show today, we have the 1997 edition
where the dates be began in January 1999 with
Rocket Summer and end with October
2026 and the million Year Picnic.
Interestingly enough, we are recording this in 2025.
So I suspect that future editions of the Martian
Chronicles will start us off maybe in
January 2030 and push us out
into December or October
of 2055. And maybe by then
in real life, maybe by then Elon or
whoever will actually have figured out how the
heck to get us to those Martian
canals.
So let's go back to the book, back to the Martian Chronicles. So I. I
want to pick up in June 2001. And the moon
be still as bright
in this one. In this story, in the first piece of the
Martian Chronicles, we begin to explore
the idea, the core idea that I'm going to talk about today for leaders,
which is this idea of the impact of
or the nature of the philosophy
of existentialism. In the story, we meet a
crew of folks who, who rocket off to Mars
from, from Earth. And inside this crew are Captain
Wilder and Cherokee and Hathaway and Sam Parkhill
and a man, a man named Spender
and Spender specifically. Jeff Spender
is a man who, well, who's a man
who is out of place. He is out of place with his crew. Matter of
fact, if we, if we looked at him through the lens of the social
socio sexual hierarchy, that is, that is
a term created by the gentleman
Vox Day, who writes on Substack, we would say that Jeff
Spender is a classic Gamma in his crew. He's
not an Alpha, he's definitely not a Sigma and he's surely
not an obedient Delta or a Bravo.
He is a. He is a guy who likes walls of text.
He's a guy who is a king in his own mind. He's a guy
who likes to be in control. And
how is this replicated? How do we see this in the story?
Well, Jeff Spender winds up wandering away from the Remain,
from the, the larger group after they, after they set a fire
and begin to begin to sort of explore the Martian
territory. A Martian territory that to them
seems empty, where they can run around and
christen things and they can, they can run around and drink
and, and carouse and have a good time.
Of course Spender doesn't want to carouse. Spender is falling
in love with the Martian landscape. Matter of fact, he loves the Martian
landscape more than he loves human beings.
And he looks at their partying, views their partying as a
sign of disrespect and disingenuousness.
Spender goes away for a week after
threatening people and then
returns and begins shooting
the folks that are in the astronauts party.
Of course, because he
winds up shooting the humans. They
then of course wind up hunting him through the
Martian landscape and up a Martian mountain
and, and the Captain towards the back end of
the story has a, has a conversation
with him. And it starts off like this at the top
of the mountain. Spender says,
because I've seen what these Martians had, was just as good as anything we'll ever
hope to have. They stopped where we should have stopped a hundred years ago.
I've walked in their cities and I know these people and I'll be glad to
call them my ancestors. They have a beautiful city there. The Captain
nodded at one of several places. It's not that alone. Yes, their
cities are good. They knew how to blend art into their living.
It's always been a thing apart for Americans. Art was something you
kept in the crazy son's room upstairs. Art was something you
took in Sunday doses mixed with religion, perhaps. Well,
these Martians have art and religion and everything.
You think they knew what it was all about, do you? For my money. And
for that reason you started shooting people? When I was a kid, my folks took
me to visit Mexico City. I'll always remember the way my father acted loud and
big. And my mother didn't like the people because they were dark and didn't wash
enough. And my sister wouldn't talk to most of them. I was the only one,
really. I was the only one who really liked it. And I could see my
mother and father coming to Mars and acting the same way here.
Anything that's strange is no good to the average American if it doesn't have Chicago
plumbing. It's nonsense. The thought of that. Oh God, the thought of
that. And then. Then the war. You heard the Congressional
speeches before we left. If things work out, they hope to establish three atomic research
and atom bomb depots on Mars. That means Mars is finished. All this
wonderful stuff is gone. How would you feel if a Martian vomited stale liquor on
the White House floor? The captain said nothing, but
listened. Spender continued, and then the other power
interests coming up, the mineral men and the travel men. Do you remember what happened
to Mexico when Cortez and his very fine good friends arrived from Spain? Spain.
A whole civilization destroyed by greedy righteous bigots.
History will never forgive Cortez.
You haven't acted ethically yourself today, observed the captain.
What could I do argue with you? It's simply me against the whole
crooked, grinding, greedy setup on Earth. They'll be flopping their
filthy atom bombs up here fighting for bases to have wars. Isn't it enough they've
ruined one planet without ruining another? Do they have to foul someone else's manger?
The simple minded windbags. When I got up here I felt I was not only
free of their so called culture, I felt like I was free of their ethics
and their customs. I'm out of their frame of reference. I thought. All I have
to do is kill all you off and live my own life.
Close quote. By the way, that's a classic gamma rant
king in his own mind. But
it's also the rant of someone who
has fully and completely imbibed the
horrors of mid 20th century
existentialism.
One of the things you have to understand if you actually want to
lead is you have to understand how to
take complicated ideas and make them very,
very simple for folks. And
you have to understand a complicated thing. Well Enough
to simplify it for people who can't follow the
bouncing ball. So I'm going to try to make this
as simple as I possibly can, because
this is incredibly important. The Martian
Chronicles is not just a science fiction fix
up novel. It's not just a collection of disparate stories
barely hanging on together, bound together
by two apocalyptic narrative threads. It's not just that.
It's Ray Bradbury working out and
talking about and introducing quite frankly to a conformist
19, mid 19, mid
1950s and mid 20th century American public.
He's introducing ideas that would eventually wind up
leading to the situation culturally
and intellectually that we have now in the United States.
Now, Bradbury couldn't see that back then because at the time his
biggest battle was the battle against what he
perceived as religious stifling conformity. Matter
of fact, the voice of Spender in that last piece that I read is the
voice, I believe, of Ray Bradbury. The frustration
with the suffocation of a conformist culture.
A conformist culture that was about to borrow blow up in the
1960s and 1970s.
And we could see this in the Martian Chronicles because it is a book
without. It's a book without a happy ending,
similar to books that
we've covered from the 20th century. On this podcast before.
Ray Bradbury's the Martian Chronicles is similar
in style and approach to
or Or. It's the book example of the rant by the
great Charlie Kaufman, played by Nicholas Cage in the movie
adaptation. And in that
movie, Charlie Kaufman, again played by Nicholas Cage,
goes to a screenwriting seminar held by
the great Robert McKee, played by the
inimitable who never mails it in, Brian Cox.
And Brian Cox stands on a stage and starts talking about how to, you know,
write a screenplay, how to write a script, how to write anything, basically.
And Charlie Kaufman is of course experiencing writer's block. And
Charlie stands up and he, he has this great line,
right, that he asks Mr. McKee, which of course sets up Mr.
McKee for having a massive rant about
the meaning of writing a rant that's quite frankly
anti existentialist. The question
that launches this rant is this,
what do you happen? Or what do you. How do you write a story
where the writer is attempting to create something where nothing
much happens, where people don't change, they don't have
any epiphanies, they struggle and are frustrated and nothing is resolved?
More a reflection of, quote, unquote, the real world.
Kaufman asked this question and McKee of course responds
by saying, why would I waste two hours of my precious
time to observe the real world.
I come here to escape the real world.
This is the tension that's evident in the Martian Chronicles. And one of the things
that's imbued in it from the real world is this,
this existential dread, this, this
sense that there can't be any
change, there can't be any epiphany. There is no meaning
and nothing is resolved. The post
war 1950s in America was a time of,
in people's memory that was inflated in
different kinds of ways, both by people who are temperamentally cynical and people
who are also temperamentally naive. The
cynics, 80 years later look back at post
war, the post war 1950s in America and
they hold that the mid 20th century was a time of
naive optimism, buoyed by military power
and of course, enforced cultural conformity.
And of course, the naive, for their part, believe that the mid 20th century was
a time, to paraphrase some, Garrison Keeler in that great
NPR show, A Prairie Home Companion quote, where all
the women were strong, all the men were good looking and all the children
were above average. But inside
even A Prairie Home Companion lies existential
dread, lies the idea that even though the women are good
looking and the children are well behaved and above average,
and even though the men are strong, that there's no
meaning there. What can we get from that?
What. What is the meaning behind that? And this is the
same challenge that Charlie Kaufman is struggling with in Adaptation.
Made. Made in the early 2000s, right,
the seeds of all that were planted in the 1950s by
French existential philosophers like Jean Paul Sartre and Simone
de Beauvoir and of course, Albert Camus.
The horror of the success of French existentialist belief
systems that captured elite thought and then drifted down
into the masses in the 60s and 70s was that it
eroded the foundation of spiritual belief in a
transcendent reward in exchange for materialism,
commercialism and individualism in the here and now. And in
that exchange, that exchange, of course led to
nihilism and
atheism. Or if not atheism,
at the very minimum. Maybe not agreeing that God
is dead, but sort of nodding along when the statement is made,
we can't lay all this at the feet of Ray Bradbury. Of course, it's too
much weight to put on the Martian Chronicles to carry all this, but it is.
The book does serve as an
example of what existential dread
can look like wrapped up in technological
sophistication and cultural
barbarity.
SA
Back to the book, back to The Martian Chronicles
by Ray Bradbury. So one of the more
curious episodes or short stories
or short pieces in this fix up novel from Bradbury
that will set up my next point that I think is, is important for leaders
to pay attention to is the story from June
2003 in the, in
this edition, the 1997 edition that I have of the Martian Chronicles.
And it is a story called Way in the Middle of the Air.
And it was sort of one of the more
surprising stories that I ran
across here in the Martian Chronicles as a
reader of science fiction. It is a
story about,
well, it's a story about all of the black people,
all of the African Americans
getting their money together, getting a rocket,
getting on the rocket and leaving Earth.
Yeah, I kind of didn't expect this
story dropped in the middle of this collection. And it,
it stands out because number one,
it seems that it's Ray Bradbury's attempt to deal
with segregation, deal with
Jim Crow, deal with things
he was reading about that were occurring in the south
in the 1950s, and of course the attempts by,
by folks like Martin Luther King Jr. And other civil rights activists to
desegregate the South. But of course,
it is a story written from a long way
away and written, of course, with the tools that
Bradbury had at hand. Now, Bradbury was not
a political commentator, nor was he a
social commentator, but he could put politics
and social commentary into his writings, as he already has
demonstrated with Spender and with other stories here in this
collection. But it jumps out most notably here
in this story, Way in the Middle of the Air.
What jumps out to you also is the
way in which the white people respond
to or react to the as
it's framed here, Steady river,
just to quote here from just a second, the river
flowed black between the buildings with a rustling creek and
a constant whispering shuffle. It was a very quiet thing with a great
certainty to it. No laughter, no wildness, just a
steady decided and ceaseless flow.
Teece sat on the edge of his hardwood chair. If one of em so much
as last, by Christ, I'll kill him. The men waited.
The river passed quietly in the dreamful noon. Looks like
you're gonna have to hoe your own turnip, Sam. Grandpa chuckled. I'm
not bad at shootin white folks neither. Tease didn't look at
Grandpa. Grandpa turned his head away and shut up his
mouth. And of course people,
the people sitting on the porch, the men, the white men sitting on the porch,
do attempt in particular Samuel Tees do
attempt to stop the black people from leaving,
as he says here, all over space jerked out of rockets
like so many minnows hit by a meteor, by God. Space full of meters, you
know that sure. Thickest buckshot powy shoot him down.
Tin can rockets like so many ducks. So many clay pipes. Old
sardine cans full of black cod. Banging like a string of lady fingers. Bang, bang,
bang, bang, bang. 10,000 dead here, 10,000 there. Floating
in space, around and around Earth, ever and ever cold and way out.
Lord, you hear that? You hear that? You there. The
rage, right, of the white man being denied
his quote, unquote, niggers who are getting in a
rocket and going away. The river was broad
and continuous. Having entered all cotton shacks during the hour, having
flooded all the valuables out, it was now carrying the clocks and the
washboards, the silk bolts and curtain rods on down to some
distant black sea. High tide passed. It was 2 o'.
Clock. Low tide came. Soon the river was dried up. The town was silent. The
dust settling in a film on the stores, the seated men, the
tall hot trees. Silence.
By the way, there's something also that's interesting in the story, Way
in the Middle of the Air. It kind of reminds you
in a way that I'm sure Bradbury
intended because he was quite well read. He got all of his
education out of libraries. It reminds you
of the leaving of the
Jews from Egypt and in the book of Exodus,
a similar kind of stream of humanity
leaving oppressors while they
basically pay for
the oppressed to leave. Bradbury
clearly liked this idea. And in this,
in this story it sticks out because,
well, most science fiction tends to,
at least most American science fiction written during the mid 20th century,
tends to ignore race, tends
to set up a world where
racial injustice, and we saw this on television
in Star Trek, where racial injustice has just
somehow faded away without any. Any
details as to how exactly
we got there.
So what are we to take from that little piece from
way in the middle of the air? What are we to take from the river
of black people leaving the south, getting on a rocket,
and much like the Jews in the Exodus story,
going to the promised land of Mars. By the way, there's another
story, the. The other apocalyptic event that occurs.
A nuclear war. 20 years later, 22 years
actually, after the black people leave the South, a nuclear
war occurs. And Earth sends out a signal,
asking or requesting or
demanding that depending upon your perspective, that
all the humans on Mars return home. And
of course, all the humans on Mars dutifully do return
home, only to die in an Atomic war
again, more existential dread now capped with cynical
irony, of course. In
my estimation. I wondered, did all the
black people get on the rockets to go back
or did they just stay on Mars?
One of those unanswerable questions. But I like to imagine that
they wouldn't have gotten back on the rockets because why would you want to go
back home after 20 years? What would make you think that it would be better?
Besides, you would have had 20 years to set up a civilization, right? You would
have had 20 years to set up a Liberia on
Mars. I'm sure it all
worked out anyway. That's that whole,
like, cynical, like, lack of sincerity thing. I should actually say
it probably did work out. I should probably say that
I'm glad that they left. I should probably say
that everything
works out in the end.
This is one of the challenges, one of the curses of our time. And I
actually just sort of role modeled it there. I actually just sort of demonstrated it
there in my comments. The major
curse in our time is that we can,
we could spot actually, we're stunningly good at
spotting hypocrisy in leaders and in institutions and
in ideas. We're stunningly good at
cynically pointing out that hypocrisy, sometimes even
stunningly good at spotting it and pointing it out in ourselves. But we
are less. We are less good.
We are less able to actually be,
actually exhibit the quality of sincerity.
Sincerity, for better or worse, is linked culturally and socially
in America to the same
cockeyed optimism that led American people
to go west. Right? Go west, young man, go west. Right?
And of course, it is linked to the
cockeyed optimism that allowed people to,
particularly white people, if we're going to be blunt about it,
to accomplish the tenets of Manifest
Destiny, right? Which in
our benighted time. That's the second time I've used that term on this
podcast today. In our bedided time, we
culturally deride. We deride Manifest Destiny.
We deride cockeyed optimism. We look at that
as a sign of naivete and of being a
sucker. Culturally,
Americans perceive a lack of ulterior motives in people and especially in
leaders, and a lack of guile, a lack of deception seat
as a sign of naive trust in the ability to be,
quote, unquote, taken as if all of life
were a massive confidence game and somehow we
are all the marks.
But I think, and I take
this from the Martian Chronicles, I think Bradbury
desperately wanted to believe.
So did Fox Mulder many years later on that great Horry show from the
1990s, the X Files. And Bradbury wanted to
believe not just in Mars being full of Martians or
in racial animus disappearing in interpersonal relationships in
America. He sincerely wanted to believe
that sincerity, that cockeyed optimism
itself, would somehow be rewarded by, in this
material existence, and
that we could get that reward
without dread, without complication.
And honestly, and this is probably the
1950s thing, without that much cultural effort.
Oh, and of course, that we could get it without religion and without an
appeal to a transcendent or higher
form of meaning.
I think we can get to sincerity. I think we
can achieve cockeyed optimism, but I do not think
we can do that without belief, without
faith in a transcendent God.
So what are we to make of all of this?
I've tossed a couple of ideas out at you. I've talked a little bit about
existentialism. I've talked a little bit about nihilism.
I've talked a little bit about cultural sincerity
at a leadership level. What are we to take from this? How
are we to bring some ideas from the Martian
Chronicles forward and really apply them in our own
lived leadership lives in ways that actually make
sense? How are we to do that
in 2025, one year away
from, you know, the million year silence that,
that Bradbury talks about or the
Million Year Picnic, or one year away from the Million Year Picnic that
Bradbury talks about or addresses in his book?
Well, I think we have to have a return
to the old strong gods.
I'm not talking about the pagan gods, right? I'm not talking about the pagan gods
of Pan or Zeus or Jupiter or Athena or any
of the Viking gods or any of the Hindu gods or any of the other
nonsense. I'm not talking about a return to paganism. I, I think that way,
that way lies more cultural barbarism just at scale
with technological sophistication.
I think we have to have a return to the old strong gods
of sincerity. Sincerity
is the quality of being free from pretense, deceit, or
hypocrisy. And in leadership, it is the
antidote to the poison of cultured cynicism and even
worse, deconstructionism that has annihilated the
depth of meaning in America. We
have to rebuild the foundations of meaning. I'm not the first
person to say that we're in a meaning crisis. Matter of fact, I brought up
that meaning crisis many times on this show. It's one of the reasons I do
this show. I want to provide people with books
that can point them to meaning.
Or books that can point them to what the forces are
that are destroying or have destroyed meaning.
But we have to rebuild. We have
to stop deconstructing. We've deconstructed enough.
We've deconstructed cynically and nihilistically and
atheistically. And to what end?
What exactly has it gotten us?
The only thing left to do is to turn back to sincerity.
Sincerity and traditions, sincerity and families,
sincerity and community. Sincerity and interpersonal
relationships between you and your fellow man.
One point that is worthwhile to make
people do get confused on empathy is not the same as
sincerity. Empathy is sold quite a bit in our culture these days.
It's the gloss that's put over everything, particularly the
gloss that's put over, you know, approved positions or
by the professional managerial class or
the normies. Sincerity,
I'm sorry, not sincerity, but empathy. Empathy is marketed to
us, but not sincerity. Empathy, of course,
is weaponized against conscientious people in
order to manipulate those same conscientious people into
supporting things that go against. Go directly against their
best interests. But sincerity,
well, sincerity can only be mocked by the forces of
nihilism or deconstructionism or cynical
disinterest and dismissed. Of course,
both empathy and sincerity are not
the same thing. And we need to understand
and recognize the difference between the two of them.
Sincerity, of course, can't walk along by itself. It has to
be accompanied by some friends and.