Other People’s Thoughts
This is the sixty-eighth chapter in Other People’s Thoughts, a China Heritage series inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.
Pierre remarked that the resulting modest volume of quotations was ‘idiosyncratically compiled for the amusement of idle readers’ (see Simon Leys, Other People’s Thoughts, 2007). Our aim is similar: to amuse our readers (idle or otherwise); as is our modus operandi: to build up an idiosyncratic compilation, one that reflects the interests of The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology and its coterie.
In collecting this material, and by adding to it over time, we accord also with a Chinese literary practice in which quotations — sometimes called yǔlù 語錄, literally ‘recorded sayings’ — have a particular history, and a powerful resonance.
The most famous collection of recorded sayings is The Analects 論語, compiled by disciples of Confucius. Then there is the timeless 5000-words of Laozi’s The Tao and the Power 道德經, as well as the Chan/Zen 禪宗 tradition of what in English are known by the Japanese term kōan 公案, dating from the Tang dynasty. Modern imitations range from the political bon mots of Mao Zedong to excerpts from the prolix prose of Xi Jinping’s tireless speech writers, and published snippets from arm-chair philosophers and motivational speakers.
Other People’s Thoughts also finds inspiration in the ‘poetry talks’ 詩話, ‘casual jottings’ 筆記 and ‘marginalia’ 眉批 of China’s literary tradition.
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As is now customary in Other People’s Thoughts, this latest, extended chapter in the series includes videos and illustrative material.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
14 November 2025
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Other People’s Thoughts I-LXVII:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, LXVIII
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Civilization inevitably runs to its end with a blindfold over its eyes.
— Eugène Huzar, 1855
Translation
Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is the burden of the curse of Babel.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays
偷渡
我從未想過，在自己的祖國，使用母語像是一場偷渡。每一次寫作，是在進行一趟不可告人的走私。… 黨媒又開始說應允許大家說真話了。別天真，其實一直允許說真話，只是什麼算真話，由說假話的人決定。
— 李大眼（李承鵬），看，那满地黄花堆积的瓷器，2020年3月14日
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許章潤如是說
金玉其外，敗絮其中
Chinese people today live with a strange paradox.
Internationally, China looks strong. It is America’s only rival in terms of the power to shape the world. The recent meeting between President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China, in which the leaders announced a trade-war truce, has fed this narrative — one that Beijing is only too happy to promote — a resilient nation united in the face of external challenges.
That muscular facade is punctured here in China, where despair about dimming economic and personal prospects is pervasive. This contrast between a confident state and its weary population is captured in a phrase Chinese people are using to describe their country: “wai qiang, zhong gan,” roughly translated as “outwardly strong, inwardly brittle.”
— Helen Gao, China Looks Strong. Life Here Tells a Different Story, The New York Times, 13 November 2026
William Blake and Me
Although much of his work seems impenetrable he never ceased in his desire to connect with the populace. He has succeeded in offering both. He has been the spiritual ancestor of generations of poets and alchemical detectives seeking their way through the labyrinth of inhuman knowledge even as schoolchildren recite his verses. His proverbs have become common parlance.
— Patti Smith, William Blake and Me
解脫：有形無形間
宣州陸亙大夫初問南泉曰：古人瓶中養一鵝，鵝漸長大，出瓶不得。如今不得毀瓶，不得損鵝，和尚作麼生出得。南泉召曰：大夫。陸應諾。南泉曰：出也。陸從此開解。
—《景德傳燈錄》卷一《陸亙大夫》
What can we hope for?
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburan electorate would decide that the system had failed. They would start looking around for a populist ‘strongman’ who would pay homage to their fears. He would be elected to the Oval Office and ultimately roll back the progressive achievements of the previous decades… Media-created pseudo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody war would be manufactured to distract citizens from exploitation by the ‘super rich’ and the resentment which badly educated American feel about having their manners dictated to them by College graduates. This strongman leader will be a disaster for the country and the world.
— Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 1998
[The constitution] can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.
— Benjamin Franklin
Nanoship
The world moves quickly now, and dating is no different. Some people are looking for more of a fleeting fling. Nanoships are microrelationships focused on enjoying the present and with no future goals. They can last up to a few months, or be as little as hours, minutes, or seconds. That’s right, the connection clock is down to seconds.
We can scroll for hours, but want to find connections for seconds?
— Robert Wilding, New Dating Buzzwords, 16 October 2025
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HanaClio on Cancel Culture
Click here
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Tech-libertarianism
Paulina Borsook: It bespeaks a lack of human connection and a discomfort with the core of what many of us consider it means to be human. It’s an inability to reconcile the demands of being individual with the demands of participating in society, which coincides beautifully with the preference for and a glorification of being the solo commander of one’s computer in lieu of any other economically viable behavior. Computers are so much more rule-based, controllable, fixable, and comprehensible than any human will ever be. As many political schools of thought do, these techno-libertarians make a philosophy out of a personality defect. …
Gil Duran: One of your central themes is that high tech culture is emotionally stunted, unable to, as you put it, reconcile the demands of being individual with the demands of participating in society. And in recent years, we’ve seen people like Elon Musk and others openly declare war on empathy. Many in tech are dreaming of a post-human or trans-human world where everything is eaten by AI and which maybe we no longer even live on this planet. It was a real lack of humanity, of connection to humanity on the part of a lot of these billionaires. What do you think is the root cause of this lack of humanity? Is it the technology? Is it the money? Is it something else?
Paulina Borsook: I get into very risky territory here, but you’re kind of asking me a question of like, you know, how many of these people are on the spectrum? And one of the definitions of being on the spectrum is that you can be sweet, you can be considerate, you can be a bunch of things, but you may not be very good at imagining what other people feel, not reading emotional cues very well. And I have wondered about that a lot. There’s another piece of this question is, if you also have been weaned on what do they call them, first person shooter games, other entities in that are just wallpaper or things to shoot down. You’re not really thinking about the larger consequences of anything. You just want to win that round of the game.
— Gil Durán, She Warned About Silicon Valley 25 Years Ago. We Ignored Her., The Nerd Reich, 25 September 2025
Egg vs Wall
If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals … We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it’s too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us — create who we are. It is we who created the system.
— Haruki Murakami, Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, 15 February 2009
The New Abyss
My generation was taught Nazism was the greatest evil; and it was… Today, a state starving millions, shooting children for sport, shielded by democracies and dictators alike, is the new abyss of cruelty.
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur
萬潤南
在中國的現代史中，有一類人，既非皇權的臣僕，也非權力的反面。他們是縫隙中的建橋者，是理想與現實之間的擺渡人。萬潤南，正是這樣的一個人。
他不是天生的革命者，也不是高舉大旗的領袖。他原本只是一個工程師，一個民營企業的創業者，一個在八十年代相信“溫和改革”可能改變中國命運的人。…
萬潤南沒有像一些人那樣為了“回國”而去討好權力，也沒有因孤獨而放棄信念。他保持著一份溫和而清醒的倔強。他的主張是：縱使民運低潮或不堪，回國仍是屈辱。
這種倔強不是喊口號，而是一種冷靜的堅持——不向惡勢力低頭，也不讓仇恨吞噬心靈。… 而我與他的兩次邂逅——一次在鐵窗之中通過一張報紙，另一次在巴黎的微光下握手——正好跨越了這座橋的兩個時代：一端是怒濤中的理想，一端是流亡中的堅持。
— 姜福禎，萬潤南：橋梁、火光與鄉愁
Albo in Trump’s Domus Aurea
A slobbering Albanese has, understandably, cuffed our ankle to the American Xenomorph right as it’s set to be jettisoned into space. We dream of a mutual oblivion with America, like Butch and Sundance, bursting forth from cover together to be riddled by countless bullets with “Chinese mag-trains 4eva” etched on them. Of course, when it does come, our demise will go unnoticed, like the death of any nameless henchman in the exploding moon base of a bleeding out Bond villain.
— Patrick Marlborough, Yea Nah Review, 23 October 2025
No Kings
Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan had the best line of the day at the “No Kings” rally in Washington, D.C., a biting dig at President Donald Trump.
“The great irony is, of course, that Donald Trump is the son of an immigrant, the grandson of an immigrant, and married to an immigrant. In fact, two of his three wives were immigrants, proving yet again that immigrants will do the jobs that even Americans are not willing to do.”
The crowd erupted in laughter at Hasan’s zinger.
— 18 October 2025
The cranks, incompetents and ambitious losers recruited to carry out Trump’s vengeance invariably display a spectrum of quirks. His preference would be that they would all be a chorus line of former beauty queens. “It’s that face. It’s those lips. They move like a machine gun,” Trump has mused about his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt. Whoever the Trump misfit might be, beauties or Ed Martin, they are replaceable widgets that function within the system he has created. Trump wages war on the “enemies within” with the eccentrics at his disposal. They represent the revenge of the second-rate or less, taking positions once held by the most qualified and then wreaking havoc on their meritorious betters in a wave of resentment. They reflect their damaged leader. That is the beating heart of Trumpism.
— Donald Trump has built a regime of retribution and reward, The Guardian, 24 October 2025
Epstein on Trump
“I have met some very bad people. None as bad as Trump. Not one decent cell in his body. So, yes, very dangerous.”
— in an email from Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Summers, February 2017
Second-screen culture
What you need to know about your audience here is that they will watch the show, perhaps on their mobile phone, or on a second or third screen while doing something else and talking to their friends, so you need to both show and tell, you need to say much more than you would normally say. […] You need your audience to understand what’s going on, even if they’re not looking at the screen.
— Daphne Ida Ridiz, Too distracted to watch?, The Conversation, 18 February 2025
AI
The biggest capital outlay ever, for a product that no one will pay for. OpenAl loses ten billion dollars a quarter. There is no path to profitability for subprime Al. These absurd data centers will stand sentinel over the ruins of our fake economy like moai on Easter Island.
— Seth Harp, X, 2 November 2025
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ChatGPT according to Isaac Bari
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Joe’s Howl
Last night I woke up at 3 a.m., unable to sleep, and ended up on the couch with my old college copy of Howl, which I recently unearthed. As I read part II, the section about “Moloch!”, I realized, with the force of revelation, that “Moloch” could be replaced with the word “Internet” and it would update the poem perfectly—and to powerful effect. It captured, with fresh urgency, how I feel about this whole rotten enterprise and what it hath wrought.
This morning I went ahead and made the replacements and it’s a bit shocking how well it works. For thematic consistency, I also replaced “cement and aluminum” in the opening line with “ones and zeroes.” I hope that Allen Ginsberg, whom I saw and heard speak in his time, would not be opposed to this homage. And really—Moloch, Internet—what’s the difference?
What sphinx of ones and zeroes bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Internet! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Internet! Internet! Nightmare of Internet! Internet the loveless! Mental Internet! Internet the heavy judger of men!
Internet the incomprehensible prison! Internet the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Internet whose buildings are judgment! Internet the vast stone of war! Internet the stunned governments!
Internet whose mind is pure machinery! Internet whose blood is running money! Internet whose fingers are ten armies! Internet whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Internet whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Internet whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Internet whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Internet whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Internet whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Internet whose love is endless oil and stone! Internet whose soul is electricity and banks! Internet whose poverty is the specter of genius! Internet whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Internet whose name is the Mind!
Internet in whom I sit lonely! Internet in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Internet! Cocksucker in Internet! Lacklove and manless in Internet!
Internet who entered my soul early! Internet in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Internet who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Internet whom I abandon! Wake up in Internet! Light streaming out of the sky!
Internet! Internet! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Internet to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
— Joe Hagan, Internet! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness!, Hey Joe, 4 October 2025
Was ich gern früher über Deutschland gewusst hätte
A society governed by regulations, yet lacking individual moral judgment, is more dangerous than one with none at all.
A society that values obedience without questioning authority is destined to become corrupt.
A society that admits to error but refuses to reflect on its origins possesses a mind as stubborn and dull as granite.
Here, at a deserted street, people stop dutifully at a red light. Not a car in sight. This, I once thought, is the mark of a highly evolved society.
At the heart of bureaucracy lies a collective endorsement of power’s legitimacy, and therefore, individuals surrender their moral judgment — or perhaps never developed one. They abandon challenge. They relinquish dispute.
When conversation becomes avoidance, when topics must not be mentioned, we are already living under the quiet logic of authoritarianism.
When the majority believe they live in a free society, it is often a sign that the society is not free. Freedom is not a gift; it must be wrestled from the hands of banality and the quiet complicity with power.
— Ai Weiwei, What I Wish I Had Known About Germany Earlier, 20 October 2025
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王世堅《沒出息》
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Twenty Essential Chinese Slang Terms Defining Modern Life
- E人 / I人 (E rén / I rén): E-Person (Extrovert) / I-Person (Introvert)
- 宅男 / 现充 (zháinán / xiànchōng): Homebody / Living the Life (Indoor person vs person who enjoys real-world connection)
- 神评论 / 辣评 (shén pínglùn / là píng): Epic comment/ Toxic comment
- 男神 / 渣男 (nánshén / zhānán): Ideal man / the player (man)
- 女神 / 渣女 (nǚshén / zhānǚ): Ideal woman / the player (woman)
- 偷感 / 松弛感 (tōugǎn / sōngchí gǎn): Cringe vibe / Big Dick Energy (The unconfident type VS the laid-back confident type)
- 怨种 / 人精 (yuān zhǒng / rénjīng): Doormat (Fool) / Smooth Operator
- 社牛 / 社恐 (shèniú / shèkǒng): Extrovert King/Queen / Introvert King/Queen
- 高富帅 / 矮穷矬 (gāo fù shuài / ǎi qióng cuó): The Tall, Rich, Handsome Man / Short, Poor, Ugly Man
- 白富美 / 黑丑穷 (bái fù měi / hēi chǒu qióng): Rich, Beautiful / Ugly, Poor
- 小鲜肉 / 老腊肉 (xiǎo xiānròu / lǎo làròu): Young / Old handsome man
- 学霸 / 学渣 (xuébà / xuézhā): Straight-A student / Academic Slacker
- 躺平 / 内卷 (tǎngpíng / nèijuǎn): Quiet quitting/ Hyper-competition (Rat race)
- 绝绝子 / 烂爆了 (juéjuézi / làn bào le): Unbeatable, Slay / Total Trash (It sucks)
- 出圈 / 凉了 (chūquān / liáng le): Break Out (Go viral) / Flopped (Failed)
- 背锅 / 甩锅 (bēiguō / shuǎiguō): Take the blame / Pass the buck
- 网红 / 路人甲 (wǎnghóng / lùrén): Internet Celebrity / Nobody (Walking lady/man)
- 人间清醒 / 恋爱脑 (rénjiān qīngxǐng / liàn’ài nǎo): The highly rational, emotionally detached/ Obsessed with relationships (Love-Struck or Obsessed)
- 种草 / 拔草 (zhòngcǎo / bácǎo): Planting Grass (Get Hyped/Create desire) / Pulling Grass (Buy it/Satisfy desire)
- 摸鱼/划水 (mōyú / huáshuǐ): Slacking Off / Coasting (Doing the bare minimum)
Note: All slang terms in this list are opposite (antonymous), except for the last pair, which consists of synonyms (or closely related terms).
— The Mandarin Flow, 2 November 2025
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Halloween in Shanghai, 2025
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Consolation by Billy Collins
How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hill towns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every road sign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous domes
and there is no need to memorize a succession of kings
or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon’s
little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.How much better to command the simple precinct of home
than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?
Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyed camera eager
to eat the world one monument at a time?Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice,
I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress
known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning
paper, all language barriers down,
rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone
willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the caras if it were the great car of English itself
and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off
down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.
— The Art of Drowning, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995
A Question for the Zuck
“If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? No hate, but yeah, give your money away, shorties.”
Full stop
After forty years in the classroom, my career ended with one small sentence from a six-year-old:
“My dad says people like you don’t matter anymore.”
No sneer. No malice. Just quiet honesty — the kind that cuts deeper because it’s innocent. He blinked, then added, “You don’t even have a TikTok.”
— Clara Holt, a message from a kindergarten teacher, 23 October 2025
Burnout
Across the parking lot was a smoke shop where we picked up an AI-enabled Chinese vape. The vape constantly monitors your conversations to pick up clues about your personality; then, when you hit it, a screen on the side lights up with an animation of a Confucian sage who either praises your enormous vapour cloud or mocks your limited lung capacity. I had an experimental puff. Five milligrams of Shenzhen factory effluent instantly cauterised my airways. I collapsed into a coughing fit as the sage whinnied happily. Look at Sam, it said, he can’t take it, what a pretentious little English bitch. It cost $24.99. …
Bill was probably the oldest of the BrainFish: thick glasses, sensible silver-grey haircut, usually found wandering around with his top off, grinning at people while eating pickles with his dusty hands out of a dusty jar. He’d run some kind of tech firm in the 1980s, with a vaguely silly name from the more wide-eyed Silicon Valley of the past. Small ‘n’ Squidgy, something like that. Business software, but it had made Bill immensely rich, and he’d started facing the question that a lot of these people face once they’ve achieved everything they ever dreamed of, which is what you’re supposed to do with the rest of your life. Once you have enough money to do absolutely anything you want, it’s hard to really want anything at all, which is why you can go down to Market Street in San Francisco and see the crowds of OpenAI stakeholders standing static on the pavement at horrible angles, crooked at the waist, leaning on invisible objects, eyes clouded, drool in their beards, doing nothing at all as their net worth keeps doubling, waiting to die. Bill had avoided this fate by throwing himself into charity, something to do with controlling people’s minds via tiny microchips hidden inside the vaccines. I guess Burning Man was another outlet. He seemed nice.
— Sam Kriss, Numb at Burning Man
Zohar Mamdani’s electoral victory
Last Friday was International Cat Day! Everyday in the Sliwa household we celebrate our rescue cats. Nancy and I have rescued countless abused or neglected cats, dogs and animals over the years, and then adopt them to loving families.
As Mayor, I will put violent animal abusers in jail, deliver no kill shelters, and offer adoption incentives for animals waiting for a forever home. We will also plant more trees in every borough & increase and clean our green spaces to make our city more nature friendly. Remember- you can also vote for me on the Protect Animals Independent line.
As Mahatma Gandhi said, “The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
— @nancysliwaesq
“Fuck you @CurtisSliwa. I HATE YOU, your dumb wife, that stupid Beret of yours and all your fucking cats!”
— George Santos, 5 November 2025
New York, New York
Humanity has achieved something truly incredible and almost utopian in New York: millions of very different types of people living peaceably—and sometimes even amicably—side by side. That’s every bit as real as the death and destruction halfway around the world. For me, New York is the living counterpoint to all that suffering and hate. It’s worth protecting and building upon. In fact, it’s the most important thing: New York City is, in my humble opinion, the greatest accomplishment in the history of human civilization. We’ve long set the standard for art, culture, industry, literature—you name it. Every good and great thing is available here. As Pericles said of Athens in the funeral oration, “Because of the greatness of our city, the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as our own.” But in politics, we resigned ourselves, with a weary smile, to a certain cynicism. Now we are attempting a politics that lives up to our humane and cosmopolitan aspirations. Wedded to some hard-nosed pragmatism, it just might work.
— John Ganz, Thoughts on a Victory, 6 November 2025
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Working from Home
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Kurt buys an envelope
“Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is — we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance anymore.”
In the dark times
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
— Bertolt Brecht
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Richard Burton, Hamlet, Act II Scene 2
https://youtube.com/shorts/7mgoOZKoxnw?si=R2pqKhoxd5uH7PXv
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偉人後代的塗鴉
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Disappearing up one’s fundament
I left the Yoni Temple of the Gods in a state of deep unhappiness. The strange thing was that I didn’t even disagree with them about much. I am interested in magic and mysticism. I once spent a drunken evening in London trying to convince that little moustache guy who does the YouTube videos with Richard Dawkins to believe in astrology. I like all oracular systems. I like Tarot. I like the Nggàm spider-divination of Cameroon. I am also a vague panpsychist. I think our individual consciousnesses are just the brief permutations of a pervasive mental substance, that all of reality is in some sense charged with mentation, that when we die our individuality is extinguished but the stuff of our being rejoins that ocean of thought, and that one perfectly reasonable name for this mental substance would be God. I really do think we are all one person and that person is God. I just also believe that if God has chosen to divide himself into billions of subjective beings he must have had some reason for doing so, and it’s kinda jumping the gun to try to rejoin the absolute consciousness. Plenty of time for that when we’re dead. But this is a minor quibble. The real problem is that as soon as people start talking about energy, or the law of attraction, or the divine masculine or feminine, and especially when they start saying they belong to the conscious community, I instantly shut down. These people had melted down every great esoteric tradition, tantra and Gnosticism and shamanism and Neoplatonism and kabbalah, all rotted into this mystical slop at the end of history, whose final message is that there is nothing except yourself, no mysteries except your own, and the universe exists to help you achieve your goals.
And anyway, I thought, it doesn’t even work! It occurred to me that absolutely everyone I know who believes in twin flames and soul contracts and ascension partnerships and all of the rest of it, all the concepts that are meant to make you live and love more intentionally-absolutely all of their romantic lives were in a state of unending chaos.
Bouncing around from one obviously evil and manipulative partner to the next. Meanwhile, everyone I know in a genuinely happy and meaningful relationship has absolutely no interest whatsoever in any of this stuff. They like normal things, like books and films and each other.
— Sam Kriss, Numb at Burning Man
Study
A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.
— John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy
不為而成
不出戶，知天下；
不窺牖，見天道。
其出彌遠，其知彌少。
是以聖人不行而知，
不見而明，不為而成。
— 《道德經 · 第四十七章》