mills

My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.

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Although I tend to be hostile towards most impersonal forms of authority, I do recognize the duly constituted guardians in our midst. If you see this motherfucker coming over the fence after you, just lay lie down and start praying.
Although I tend to be hostile towards most impersonal forms of authority, I do recognize the duly constituted guardians in our midst. If you see this motherfucker coming over the fence after you, just lay lie down and start praying.
“A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows that it is not.”

Simone Weil, quoted by my father in response to this post. It is in this way that our most positive attributes can lead us into error; in the way that the strong sometimes mistake strength for virtue, the beautiful sometimes mistake appearance for self.

This is a possible consolation for faults and defects: they can bring us to understanding we’d otherwise lack.

Our appearances are accidental; as we are startled to learn in youth, staring into mirrors, we are not our faces. In posting photos of ourselves, we document coincidental elements of our identities: faces, bodies, expressions. Given that our names are no more or less arbitrary, I hope I can be forgiven for returning to a theme from months ago: the Instantiation Edition of GPOYW. Whereas last time I attempted to associate myself with inanimate instances of my name, today I present two men who have done more with it than I will. Above is Walter Mills, a British private who died at the age of 23 from exposure to shelled gas (probably phosgene) one year before the end of WWI. Mills was awarded the Victoria Cross for the incident described below: On December 10/11, 1917 at Givenchy, France, after an intense gas attack a strong enemy patrol tried to rush British posts, the garrisons of which had been overcome. Private Mills, although badly gassed himself, met the attack single-handed and continued to throw bombs until the arrival of reinforcements and remained at his post until the enemy had been finally driven off. While being carried away he died of gas poisoning but it was entirely due to him that the enemy was defeated and the line remained intact. He was five years younger than I am. I find his story -and his accidental appearance- heartbreaking; I cannot be alone in being barely able to look at his face without feeling an overwhelming simultaneity of admiration and sorrow. I also note that his Victoria Cross medal “was buried with his daughter Ellen, who died in the 1920s.” My mother’s name is Ellen; when I was a boy, she let me play with the Purple Heart and Silver Star her father earned in WWII. I don’t inflate the meaning of this additional coincidence, but it is touching in its way. Below is John Atta-Mills, whose gleeful face you may have noticed on Wikipedia’s front page over the last few weeks. His election to the presidency of Ghana was an extremely welcome example of successful, stable democracy in Africa. Despite some concerns, his predecessor ceded power gracefully and the transition of the parties wasn’t marred by violence; this unfortunately remains rare. I am happy for Ghana and John Atta-Mills, but not as happy as John Atta-Mills himself seems to be: in almost every picture you see of him, he has a smile that seems reflective of more than polish; it seems exuberant, genuine, warm, whole. I suppose I already contradict my opening assertion: after some decades, we begin to show through our faces, and by then one may regard appearance as less than totally accidental. Into both of their faces, then, I have read more than should. I can only wonder what people see in mine, if anything, and whether it matters; I am reminded of C.S. Lewis’ description of his own in Suprised by Joy: “Worst of all, there was my face. I am the kind of person who gets told, “And take that look off of your face, too… [I did not intend to look] insolent or truculent… The moments at which I was told to “take that look off” were usually those when I intended to be most abject.” Our faces are not of our making, but they attempt to make us. Lewis, pondering that which landed him in trouble, asks a question I’ve wondered about: “Can there have been [someone] among my ancestors whose expression, against my will, looked out?”

Our appearances are accidental; as we are startled to learn in youth, staring into mirrors, we are not our faces. In posting photos of ourselves, we document coincidental elements of our identities: faces, bodies, expressions. Given that our names are no more or less arbitrary, I hope I can be forgiven for returning to a theme from months ago: the Instantiation Edition of GPOYW.

Whereas last time I attempted to associate myself with inanimate instances of my name, today I present two men who have done more with it than I will.

Above is Walter Mills, a British private who died at the age of 23 from exposure to shelled gas (probably phosgene) one year before the end of WWI. Mills was awarded the Victoria Cross for the incident described below:

On December 10/11, 1917 at Givenchy, France, after an intense gas attack a strong enemy patrol tried to rush British posts, the garrisons of which had been overcome. Private Mills, although badly gassed himself, met the attack single-handed and continued to throw bombs until the arrival of reinforcements and remained at his post until the enemy had been finally driven off. While being carried away he died of gas poisoning but it was entirely due to him that the enemy was defeated and the line remained intact.

He was five years younger than I am. I find his story -and his accidental appearance- heartbreaking; I cannot be alone in being barely able to look at his face without feeling an overwhelming simultaneity of admiration and sorrow. I also note that his Victoria Cross medal “was buried with his daughter Ellen, who died in the 1920s.” My mother’s name is Ellen; when I was a boy, she let me play with the Purple Heart and Silver Star her father earned in WWII. I don’t inflate the meaning of this additional coincidence, but it is touching in its way.

Below is John Atta-Mills, whose gleeful face you may have noticed on Wikipedia’s front page over the last few weeks. His election to the presidency of Ghana was an extremely welcome example of successful, stable democracy in Africa. Despite some concerns, his predecessor ceded power gracefully and the transition of the parties wasn’t marred by violence; this unfortunately remains rare.

I am happy for Ghana and John Atta-Mills, but not as happy as John Atta-Mills himself seems to be: in almost every picture you see of him, he has a smile that seems reflective of more than polish; it seems exuberant, genuine, warm, whole. I suppose I already contradict my opening assertion: after some decades, we begin to show through our faces, and by then one may regard appearance as less than totally accidental.

Into both of their faces, then, I have read more than should. I can only wonder what people see in mine, if anything, and whether it matters; I am reminded of C.S. Lewis’ description of his own in Suprised by Joy:

“Worst of all, there was my face. I am the kind of person who gets told, “And take that look off of your face, too… [I did not intend to look] insolent or truculent… The moments at which I was told to “take that look off” were usually those when I intended to be most abject.”

Our faces are not of our making, but they attempt to make us. Lewis, pondering that which landed him in trouble, asks a question I’ve wondered about: “Can there have been [someone] among my ancestors whose expression, against my will, looked out?”

“There is a fashion today among many of my contemporaries to treat the events of their past with irony. It is a legitimate method of self-defense. ‘Look how absurd I was when I was young’ forestalls cruel criticism, but it falsifies history. We were not Eminent Georgians. Those emotions were real when we felt them. Why should we be more ashamed of them than of the indifference of old age?”
Graham Greene, in the forward to his 1971 memoir A Sort of Life (from Tyler Coates, who posted a larger excerpt which is worth reading).
“By her own request there will be no funeral, no service, no one is invited, and she will be cremated, probably tomorrow. Neither condolences nor floral offerings (or any other kind) will be accepted. If you want to do a good deed, kiss an enemy. She hasn’t gone anywhere. She ‘is that which you see before you; begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error.’”
Walter Miller Jr., author of A Canticle for Leibowitz (each discussed previously), announcing the death of his wife of “fifty years, two months, and five days.” He attributed the quote at the end to the Chinese Zen Buddhist Huang-Po.
FIg. 1: James’ equation, and me learning it the hard way. In Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety, I read that William James proposed the very simple equation above to describe self-esteem: it is the value of your success divided by your pretensions. It is easy enough to see how the values of the factors in this equation affect one another, from our childhoods, when we are pleased with ourselves for tying our shoelaces, to our adulthoods, when we are sure no one will love us in our relative obscurity, mediocrity, invisibility. Incidentally, this is why immersion in celebrity culture is not harmless, at least not totally: it amplifies your pretensions, perniciously. In addition to body dysmorphia, voyeurism and exhibitionism, and a tendency to self-exploit for attention, we derive from mass media the notion that unless one is famous, a glittering object in the gaze of cameras whose acquaintances far-exceed Dunbar’s number, we are nothing. Success -for us and for the famous- is at least partly of the world, so while the numerator is only somewhat in your control the denominator is yours to adjust. It is difficult and humiliating to do so, because you must deprogram your socialized standards and refuse to interiorize the expectations of others, all while confronting your own endless vanity. And even if you succeed, nefarious zones of weird arithmetical subversion exist in which the denominator will suddenly increase to nearly infinity: family gatherings and class reunions, for example. But increasing the numerator through additional success is not only more contingent on luck, but it is also merely temporary, as any achievement you master simply becomes the new plateau from which you judge yourself (or worse: the peak you bitterly recall climbing before your descent into the present valley). Whatever course of action we pursue, it is sobering always to reflect on how much the successes we enjoy would mean to those less-fortunate than we are, and how loathsome our pretensions thus become: they rob us of proper contentment and gratitude for what others can only envy.

FIg. 1: James’ equation, and me learning it the hard way.

In Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety, I read that William James proposed the very simple equation above to describe self-esteem: it is the value of your success divided by your pretensions. It is easy enough to see how the values of the factors in this equation affect one another, from our childhoods, when we are pleased with ourselves for tying our shoelaces, to our adulthoods, when we are sure no one will love us in our relative obscurity, mediocrity, invisibility.

Incidentally, this is why immersion in celebrity culture is not harmless, at least not totally: it amplifies your pretensions, perniciously. In addition to body dysmorphia, voyeurism and exhibitionism, and a tendency to self-exploit for attention, we derive from mass media the notion that unless one is famous, a glittering object in the gaze of cameras whose acquaintances far-exceed Dunbar’s number, we are nothing.

Success -for us and for the famous- is at least partly of the world, so while the numerator is only somewhat in your control the denominator is yours to adjust. It is difficult and humiliating to do so, because you must deprogram your socialized standards and refuse to interiorize the expectations of others, all while confronting your own endless vanity.

And even if you succeed, nefarious zones of weird arithmetical subversion exist in which the denominator will suddenly increase to nearly infinity: family gatherings and class reunions, for example.

But increasing the numerator through additional success is not only more contingent on luck, but it is also merely temporary, as any achievement you master simply becomes the new plateau from which you judge yourself (or worse: the peak you bitterly recall climbing before your descent into the present valley).

Whatever course of action we pursue, it is sobering always to reflect on how much the successes we enjoy would mean to those less-fortunate than we are, and how loathsome our pretensions thus become: they rob us of proper contentment and gratitude for what others can only envy.

“They live on the surface, they are interested in the 
transient & fleeting - they are like drift wood on the flood - They ask 
forever & only the news — the froth & scum of the eternal sea.”

Henry David Thoreau, critiquing “most men.” It is a characteristic of the age of mass media that preoccupation with news is taken to mean precisely the opposite of what Thoreau asserts; that is, in circles of the intelligentsia and of the ordinary, attention to “news” is respected as an indication of depth, erudition, sensitivity, even moral engagement.

Indeed, nothing is more offensive than to declare that you are disengaged, that you do not follow news of the latest war, election, swindle, crash. Perhaps you care only for the very local -those who exist for you as named and known individuals and their doings- or the universal -problems of human nature, love, death, not in mere instances but in general, or both; best to keep it to yourself. You will be accused not merely of apathy but of complicity in the greatest evils.

Thoreau, in suggesting that the news is the “froth & scum of the eternal sea,” recalls the previously mentioned Goethe: “All that is transitory is but a symbol.” Both seem hostile to the ephemeral, not solely because it is faddish or fleeting but because it distracts from the permanent.

We enjoy this distraction because the verities masked by the detritus of current events and the narrative we make of it all contradict the central story of our civilization: that history is a linear progression towards a brighter future, and that each generation is better than the last.

I think the appeal of this story is clear: it suggests that we’re all part of a global perfecting, a unifying process that imbues our lives and cultures with meaning. Just as we are rarely aware of the present moment because we think always of the future, as though life is ever-preparatory until the moment of death, so we may think of our age as a chapter in a book with a narrative, plot, and the sort of ending we pay to see in multiplexes. That life is unchanging in its most important experiential dimensions is an unwelcome assertion; what’s the point of it all, then? What are working for if not the future? What do we suffer for if not the future?

I am not sure what to think of Goethe’s claim or Thoreau’s eternal sea, but I do find myself discomfited by our manic obsession with news -breaking, developing, analysis, commentary, punditry- which seems more like intellectual anesthetization than awareness, more like distraction than attention.

And what a phrase: “…the froth & scum of the eternal sea.”

Bayou will run on playground equipment; she will go more or less wherever I point and say, “Bayou, go see.” She will run up walls; she sit in precariously balanced inner-tube with me on a river. Five gets all the attention because he seeks it; Bayou resists attention, except from those she’s known for some time. They are both rescued strays, but her street life was brutally traumatic; when she came home, she was nearly hairless, bruised, with scabies and mange and an animating fear of any human contact. I do not exaggerate the intelligence or personality of dogs; they are what they are, which is more than enough and how I love them (not as less difficult four-legged people). But anthropomorphizing is natural, and when I see Bayou anxiously peering out of the windows from her chair -which only she uses- I wonder what she remains vigilant against (picture below): But maybe she is just looking for cats.

Bayou will run on playground equipment; she will go more or less wherever I point and say, “Bayou, go see.” She will run up walls; she sit in precariously balanced inner-tube with me on a river.

Five gets all the attention because he seeks it; Bayou resists attention, except from those she’s known for some time. They are both rescued strays, but her street life was brutally traumatic; when she came home, she was nearly hairless, bruised, with scabies and mange and an animating fear of any human contact.

I do not exaggerate the intelligence or personality of dogs; they are what they are, which is more than enough and how I love them (not as less difficult four-legged people). But anthropomorphizing is natural, and when I see Bayou anxiously peering out of the windows from her chair -which only she uses- I wonder what she remains vigilant against (picture below):

But maybe she is just looking for cats.

“All that is transitory is but a symbol.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. This is the inscription on the grave of the aforementioned Kurt Tucholsky. On a grave what might be taken as a lyrical bit of philosophical reflection is made forcefully physical: the transitory is a decomposed body, like yours. You are transitory. Of what are you a symbol?

I take this to be Platonic: there are impermanent ideals, forms, essences, and of these the “transitory” manifestations we see are simply representations. In more contemporary terms: there are enduring conceptual classes and iterative cases: class humanae, case you. In less abstract terms: nothing that lasts a few decades is anything more than an example.

We regard time -our own and that of our civilization- as linear, successive, and indeed ascending, at least in our youth. Each generation, we feel, improves on the last not merely technologically but culturally and morally (that as we age we lose this sense is important); we are perfecting something. But time isn’t really linear, and -excluding cosmological or religious eschatology- we aren’t part of a narrative headed anywhere. We come into existence not as part of a plot but as fleeting instantiations of something apart from time: but what?

One author claimed that the word that is translated above as symbol, the German word Gleichnis, should really be rendered as parable. Are all of us and our works, the histories we trail and the cities we etch into the Earth, a parable? A parable is built of the mythic or fictive to illustrate the moral and real. What does the fiction of our lives illustrate? Is this what Kundera meant in asserting that the novel is civiliation’s “highest morality,” that in creating a fictional world our parable gains another illustrative perspective?

There is some question as to the value of permanence, too: is it better to be a symbol or an ideal? But this choice isn’t given to us, however we try to combat our transience with deeds and descendants.

Riazm, whose brilliant tumblelog I adore, also has an excellent Flickr photostream; if the photos do not suffice -they do for me- you will almost certainly enjoy the captions. I worry for Riazm (see here for the best self-portrait ever), that he will dissolve in his acidly hilarious irony. But he is probably tough enough to persevere. Note also that the above photo is much better full-size.

Riazm, whose brilliant tumblelog I adore, also has an excellent Flickr photostream; if the photos do not suffice -they do for me- you will almost certainly enjoy the captions. I worry for Riazm (see here for the best self-portrait ever), that he will dissolve in his acidly hilarious irony. But he is probably tough enough to persevere.

Note also that the above photo is much better full-size.

“Either you read a woman or you embrace a book.”
Kurt Tucholsky.
In the winter, I watch approximately 71% of the week’s sunsets from my office. I can often see rows and rows of fluorescent lights in an angled grid across the sky, like glowing monoliths pressing out to the horizon. The office extends forever and ever.
In the winter, I watch approximately 71% of the week’s sunsets from my office. I can often see rows and rows of fluorescent lights in an angled grid across the sky, like glowing monoliths pressing out to the horizon. The office extends forever and ever.
“The teeth of the smile evidenced the clinical depressive’s classic inattention to oral hygiene.”

David Foster Wallace, describing the teeth of a patient in a mental ward in Infinite Jest. I took this sentence as a probable sign that Wallace had been depressed, because the indifference to matters of personal hygiene that characteristically attaches to mental illness is not the sort of thing bragged about by the fashionably despairing, let alone the seriously suffering. Our soppy society may lionize the “mad,” transforming our pitiful emotional dysfunctions into sublime, romantic, quasi-artistic poetry, but it never accepts bad breath.

There is nothing new in observing that we tend to inflate the severity of our problems, reclassifying ordinary human phenomena as medical conditions to lend them an air of unimpeachable seriousness. We no longer respect the sorrow or the joy of common life; we must experience depression or mania. We are not neat or fastidious; we are “OCD about things [sic].” In a world which worships science, it is natural that we appropriate scientific language to describe the most minor proclivities. Allan Bloom noted this with his usual precision: I said in quoting it:

As soon as medicine bestows a title on something -pain, despair, obesity, abusiveness- it is instantly removed from the realm of judgment… and [it] becomes a sacred experience beyond interrogation, worthy of infinite deference. Hence (1) the competition among the hysterical and the young to legitimize their sorrows and sufferings by getting them ‘named,’ and (2) the increasing incidence of hard-to-test problems, like mental illness.

Everybody Cares posts dozens of excellent quotes about mental illness each week on Psychotherapy. Not surprisingly, it is not from contemporary clinicians that one sees many resonant quotes; rather, it is from the founders of psychology, who were as much philosophers of mind as scientists, and from artists, poets, novelists, and the like. It is these groups who have succeeded in telling us about depression because they do so in honest, human terms.

In reading their reckoning of madness, one feels mostly horror, and this is as it should be. I am not ashamed to be mentally ill, and on the very few occasions I’ve been treated unfairly because of bias I’m comfortable defending myself. At the same time, nothing irritates me more than “mad pride” and the sentimentalization of mental illness. I loathe the handsome actor with the solitary tear rolling down his barely-schizophrenic face in the Oscar-seeking biopic whose moral is that “insanity is just a beautifully different way of looking at the world,” as I resent the crusading activist who tells us that drug companies are enforcing cultural conformity to make money, unconcerned that when the sick go off their medicines they risk dislocation, damage, and death.

The confluence of these phenomena, (1) artistic romanticization of mental illness, (2) the misguided work of amateur philosophers to undermine categories of mental illness, and (3) the universal tendency to exaggerate our pain as we relate it to others, must make the practice of psychology and psychiatry incredibly difficult.

Sometimes, I’ve doubted whether I’m really ill, whether I haven’t just excused my moral weakness with complex and persuasive representations of a disorder I might not have, whether perhaps I’m not ill at all but just unique. But all I have to do when concerned is recall the shockingly repulsive state of affairs before I was in treatment, and for that indicator I can thank Wallace.

Daniel Holter, whom I found through the wonderful Unburying the Lead, linked to a an article which mentioned that George Bush chose for the Oval Office a painting the very subject of which he misunderstood: “He often tells visitors that it depicts Methodist circuit riders—missionaries who spread the Good Word across the Alleghenies in the 19th century. It actually depicts a horse thief fleeing a mob.” The link in the above paragraph leads to a fuller explanation of the error, one which we may be inclined to consider instructive, or perhaps symbolic (indeed, if Bush’s presidency were the fiction of a novelist and he included such an overt illustration of its nature, we’d criticize him for being too neat, too heavy-handed). The author continues: “Bush’s inspiring, proselytizing Methodist is in fact a horse thief fleeing from a lynch mob. It seems a fitting marker for the Bush presidency. Bush has consistently exhibited what psychologists call the “Tolstoy syndrome.” That is, he is completely convinced he knows what things are, so he shuts down all avenues of inquiry about them and disregards the information that is offered to him.” This seemed striking to me for many reasons, not least that while I agree that Bush has been “completely convinced he knows what things are,” I am at the same time acquainted with very few who are not similarly convinced of the accuracy of their own worldviews. We have the good sense, thanks to our pluralist educations, to deploy a kind of tact as a hedge against accusations of arrogance, but that’s mere etiquette. It is easily illustrated: simply recall the US presidential election. Were we not constantly astounded at the stupidity of the other side? Did it not seem impossible to us that anyone could vote for the candidate we opposed? In general, aren’t we amazed that the entire world doesn’t see how obvious the solutions to most major problems are? Don’t we casually call “erroneous” the views of many millions of people, including thousands of academics and thinkers older and more experienced than we are, whenever they contradict our own? Whenever there is a debate, we have a side; where there is disagreement, we inevitably have a solution! We know what is best for Iraq, Israel, Wall Street, and possibly the Earth itself! If only we were in charge! And if that strikes you as odd, it is probably because you perceive this arrogance in others but not in yourself; you nod and think, “Yes, people are so sure of themselves,” thereby suggesting that you are not such a person! (And perhaps you are not). Tolstoy syndrome is more properly called “confirmation bias,” but is associated with the author because of this quote: “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabrics of their life”. But not us! You and I are ready -ever ready- to interrogate our most cherished ideas and abandon them when we encounter sufficient reason, yes? We are not like Bush! We don’t make mistakes and we’re not close-minded and we’d only govern and control and use the mechanisms of the state for the best ends! We know about global warming, about economic theory, about foreign policy, which must be more moral! As soon as we can take over the world, we will shower it with our golden wisdom! (To achieve this sublime end, of course, some reactionary elements will need to be overcome; such is the nature of revolution). That these journalists feel compelled to deploy dehumanizing quasi-medical (“objective”) jargon to describe Bush is as fascinating as Bush’s own foibles: it makes clear that in precisely the same way that Bush unthinkingly and unreflectively acted the part of the self-assured blunderer, the thinker-gone-awry whose convictions lead us into disaster, so some of his critics will insist that they would never do so, that their minds are open and their hearts are full of light and their opinions are ever-accurate. That this is pure bullshit has been so totally demonstrated by history that it’s scarcely worth rebutting, but I will note that while I believe in Obama’s admirable humility and consideration for his opponents, I see no evidence that the great masses of Democrats and Republicans are any closer to adopting this posture. Cultural critics, intellectuals, and artists in particular are odious in this respect, which is one of the reasons why our kind are so little-trusted by the public. But at least we never make mistakes about art!

Daniel Holter, whom I found through the wonderful Unburying the Lead, linked to a an article which mentioned that George Bush chose for the Oval Office a painting the very subject of which he misunderstood:

“He often tells visitors that it depicts Methodist circuit riders—missionaries who spread the Good Word across the Alleghenies in the 19th century. It actually depicts a horse thief fleeing a mob.”

The link in the above paragraph leads to a fuller explanation of the error, one which we may be inclined to consider instructive, or perhaps symbolic (indeed, if Bush’s presidency were the fiction of a novelist and he included such an overt illustration of its nature, we’d criticize him for being too neat, too heavy-handed).

The author continues: “Bush’s inspiring, proselytizing Methodist is in fact a horse thief fleeing from a lynch mob. It seems a fitting marker for the Bush presidency. Bush has consistently exhibited what psychologists call the “Tolstoy syndrome.” That is, he is completely convinced he knows what things are, so he shuts down all avenues of inquiry about them and disregards the information that is offered to him.”

This seemed striking to me for many reasons, not least that while I agree that Bush has been “completely convinced he knows what things are,” I am at the same time acquainted with very few who are not similarly convinced of the accuracy of their own worldviews. We have the good sense, thanks to our pluralist educations, to deploy a kind of tact as a hedge against accusations of arrogance, but that’s mere etiquette.

It is easily illustrated: simply recall the US presidential election. Were we not constantly astounded at the stupidity of the other side? Did it not seem impossible to us that anyone could vote for the candidate we opposed? In general, aren’t we amazed that the entire world doesn’t see how obvious the solutions to most major problems are? Don’t we casually call “erroneous” the views of many millions of people, including thousands of academics and thinkers older and more experienced than we are, whenever they contradict our own?

Whenever there is a debate, we have a side; where there is disagreement, we inevitably have a solution! We know what is best for Iraq, Israel, Wall Street, and possibly the Earth itself! If only we were in charge!

And if that strikes you as odd, it is probably because you perceive this arrogance in others but not in yourself; you nod and think, “Yes, people are so sure of themselves,” thereby suggesting that you are not such a person! (And perhaps you are not).

Tolstoy syndrome is more properly called “confirmation bias,” but is associated with the author because of this quote:

“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabrics of their life”.

But not us! You and I are ready -ever ready- to interrogate our most cherished ideas and abandon them when we encounter sufficient reason, yes? We are not like Bush! We don’t make mistakes and we’re not close-minded and we’d only govern and control and use the mechanisms of the state for the best ends! We know about global warming, about economic theory, about foreign policy, which must be more moral!

As soon as we can take over the world, we will shower it with our golden wisdom!

(To achieve this sublime end, of course, some reactionary elements will need to be overcome; such is the nature of revolution).

That these journalists feel compelled to deploy dehumanizing quasi-medical (“objective”) jargon to describe Bush is as fascinating as Bush’s own foibles: it makes clear that in precisely the same way that Bush unthinkingly and unreflectively acted the part of the self-assured blunderer, the thinker-gone-awry whose convictions lead us into disaster, so some of his critics will insist that they would never do so, that their minds are open and their hearts are full of light and their opinions are ever-accurate. That this is pure bullshit has been so totally demonstrated by history that it’s scarcely worth rebutting, but I will note that while I believe in Obama’s admirable humility and consideration for his opponents, I see no evidence that the great masses of Democrats and Republicans are any closer to adopting this posture. Cultural critics, intellectuals, and artists in particular are odious in this respect, which is one of the reasons why our kind are so little-trusted by the public.

But at least we never make mistakes about art!

“I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.”
Erwin Schrödinger.