The Weekly Eudemon

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Complete show notes. The new McCarthyism? Probably not, but still unsettling.

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Why do the spiritual masters unanimously seem to insist on that lame piece of advice: “Live in the present moment"?

My daughter sent this Existential Comic to me. It shows three ancient philosophers competing in the Philosophy event at the Greek Olympics: Thales, who declares everything is water. Zeno, who declares motion is impossible. Socrates, who declares they’re full of bulls***. Socrates won. But of course, he didn’t really win: he refuted nothing. His refutation was even worse than Samuel Johnson’s stone-kicking “refutation” of George Berkeley. It’s a well-worn anecdote: Samuel Johnson and his...

My daughter runs. She runs in the morning, she runs at night. Runs, runs, runs. People around town see her and go, “Look at that girl! She’s a runner.” But I know she’s more than that. My daughter breathes. She breathes in the morning, she breathes at night. Breathes, breathes, breathes. She’s a breather. And you know what else? She exists. She exists in the morning, she exists at night. Exists, exists, exists. She’s an exister . . . a being. It’s All Absurdly Axiomatic It’s all...

In one of his last works before his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. The Dream In this story, the narrator goes to another solar system and lands on a planet where the inhabitants are people just like us, but untainted by the Fall in the Garden of Eden. They live, the narrator tells us: “In the same paradise as that in which . . . our parents lived before they sinned.” But the narrator, being a fallen man, corrupts the...

I went to Las Vegas last week, spending four nights at the iconic Golden Nugget in downtown Las Vegas. I spent Tuesday evening walking from the Nugget to the Strat, where I surveyed Vegas from 100 stories high for two hours. The next morning, I covered five miles of downtown Las Vegas on foot, covering huge swaths of area. On Thursday, I walked the length of the Strip, clocking in over 32,000 steps. I took a two-hour bus tour and talked with the guide. I talked with Uber drivers. I...

Gardening literature is unusual. It, in the words of literature professor M.E. Bradford, mixes “practical agricultural advice and moral reflection.” In western culture, it goes back over 2,500 years, at least to Hesiod’s The Works and Days in the 8th century BCE. Later Greeks followed suit, as did the Romans (Cato the Elder’s De Agri Cultura, Virgil’s Georgics). Agricultural literature was firmly ensconced in the classical world. It’s no surprise that America followed suit. The early...

Before creation, nothing existed. There was no matter, no energy, no desires, no images. God then created everything. As a result, everything that is, is from Him, and things have existence only in so far as they partake in the Creator, the source of all being. But when Adam sinned, he detached the world from God. He, in other words, detached the world from being. Through Adam, man lunged away from Being itself and plunged towards its opposite: Nothingness.

Joseph Epstein is the best essayist alive. He’s urbane, funny, self-deprecating. He’s a fine stylist, and he’s remarkably well-read. I remember William F. Buckley marveling at Epstein’s erudition and wondering how Epstein could have so many anecdotes and references at his disposal. Coming from a guy of Buckley’s learning, that’s high praise. So it was with great interest that I turned to his essay, “Joseph Epstein’s Lifetime Reading Plan” (found in this book) and his attempt to respond to...

The Occult Establishment looked at occult activity in the 20th century. It was a follow-up to Webb’s The Occult Underground, which examined the rise of the occult in the 19th century. The occult, Webb said, rose in the 1800s in opposition to the Enlightenment and rationalism. It then grew and, in the 1900s, became organized. And political. Webb documents in The Occult Establishment that, as the occult grew stronger in the 20th century, it started to take political positions. The entire...

“Let me tell you about COVID, the COVID vaccine, and Bitcoin.” If any person starts telling me about those things, I write them off. All three of those things are new and huge. As a result, they occupy a weird spot in the world of opinion: Everyone needs to have a stance on them and nobody’s stance is worth anything. It’s difficult to reconcile such a paradox, but here’s one way: Take your stance, be prepared to shift it, and keep it to yourself. Beliefs and practices, yes. Dogmas and...

Stoicism is, at bottom, all about silencing the mind. Dispassion in the face of things that otherwise arouse passion. Resignation in the face of things that disappoint. Indifference in the face of things that raise emotions. Mental silence. It’s a good trait, but human development didn’t stop with the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 AD, and neither did the development of Stoicism. Stoicism, you see, had a child. And her name was “Hesychasm.” Whereas Stoicism is all about quieting the...

Chuang-Tzu was not a Zen practitioner. He lived about 750 years before Bodhidharma and was the second greatest philosopher of the Tao (after Lao-Tzu). He was playful in his approach to the Tao, and it’s that playfulness that mixed with the seriousness of Buddhist metaphysics to create the Zen phenomenon. Chuang-Tzu was one of the greatest proponents of the Chinese concept of wu-wei: non-doing, non-action. His was a wu-wei born of a profound humility that seeks nothing for oneself, not even...

Everything was obvious to Wall Street investors: Brick-and-mortar businesses are failing. GameStop sells a product that is cheaper and better to buy online. GameStop is going to fail. Let’s short the crap out of its stock so we make a killing when GameStop files bankruptcy. There were supposedly more short shares than actual shares. Enter r/Wallstreetbets (queue Seven Nation Army), armed with a lot of free time and stimulus checks. They decided they like GameStop . . . or wanted to stick...

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t much bugged by Twitter deplatforming President Trump. I didn’t think it was cool, and it bothered me that a company displays such brazen arrogance, but I agree with the ACLU’s ultra-liberal Ira Glasser, who said a President always has plenty of speaking outlets. I was uber-bugged—outraged, in fact—when Amazon killed Parler’s access to the Internet altogether and, if antitrust laws mean anything, Amazon should be facing severe scrutiny in this regard. But Twitter? I...

In the fourth century, the Roman Emperor Diocletian faced a serious problem: lack of food. One of the reasons: farmers were abandoning agriculture and moving to the cities. The farmers were abandoning the farms because economic prospects in the city were far better and, in many cases, farming couldn’t sustain them and their families. Diocletian’s solution? Serfdom. Require the farmers, and their kids, and their kids’ kids, and their kids’ kids’ kids, and so on for a millennium to stay on...

The First Disposition: Love Love is rule one. It’s the thing that ought to inform your life. I think most everyone agrees with the wealthy Stoic philosopher, Seneca, who wrote, “There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with.” Five minutes of Internet surfing would yield a hundred other aphorisms about the supreme importance of love that most would agree with. But what exactly is it? It’s simply this: attraction to other. That’s...