Filling Libraries
The distinctive habit of the pseudo-intellectual: the extraction from a personal emotional morass of a thesis, a complex condemnation of the state, civilization, history, species. No sooner am I seriously depressed than I start to suspect that society is hollow, catastrophically false, terminally flawed.
In other words, that pseudo-intellectuals tend towards depression is not a coincidence; it is that depression which inspires insipid derogations of human life, the purest projections of self-loathing, in book after book, post after post.
It is not that something is wrong with the world; it is that much is wrong with me. And at the core of most philosophy, political thought, and cultural rhetoric is the simple problem of the individual’s unhappiness.
Notes from others: