Until people understand that Evil is not eradicable – not simply because it’s so bad, but because it’s a necessary part of existence – no form of mass justice will ever avoid being consumed by its unacknowledged, projected, shadow.

Irony rules history, because all values exist necessarily in tension with their opposites. Denial won’t help. Neither will magical thinking, however pious. Neither will rage.

There is one privilege that I will never give back, and that’s the privilege of thinking for myself. It used to be called “freedom of conscience”, and it’s the foundational freedom of what came to be called America.

Donald Trump was much ridiculed for asking where the tearing down of statues would end. If General Lee, why not George Washington? But, many protested, General Lee was a traitor! Um… yeah. Hmmm… seriously. Why does it even need to be explained that Washington was a traitor, too, relative to the established political order?

I have just realized, though, that it goes much deeper than Washington, all the way down to the foundation; and that foundation is freedom of conscience, which was understood way back when as the freedom to ‘worship God’ according to one’s sincerest estimation of truth. This is the first freedom, and the last. Alpha and Omega.

This freedom is itself based on a skepticism and critique of epistemic privilege. That being the privilege, in post-modern terms, to construct a narrative. All other freedoms depend on this. That’s why, in Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of Truth worked to revise the language, so that counter-narratives couldn’t even be constructed.

Seems to me that’s where we’re headed. And it’s not that crude idiot in the White House who’s driving.

Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu – chapter 60
Ruling the country is like cooking a small fish.
Approach the universe with Tao,
And evil will have no power.
Not that evil is not powerful,
But its power will not be used to harm others.
Not only will it do no harm to others,
But the sage himself will also be protected.
They do not hurt each other,
And the Virtue in each one refreshes both.
translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English