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Only in movies and books is the line between good and evil people always clear. In The Gulag Archipelago (Vol. 2), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn immortalized these words: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.” Solzhenitsyn wrote those
READ MOREAs I make my way through Paul Kengor’s wonderful book The Devil and Karl Marx, numerous things stand out about the father of communism. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it’s hard to imagine a more wretched human being than Karl Marx. It was almost as if all of the worst traits of humanity were
READ MOREI believe it is possible to have common sense “educated” out of you, whether by formal schooling, by one’s culture, or both. When I was studying literature in college, professors would deride any literary interpretation that smelled of an “essentialist” view of morality, gender, race, or reality. What they meant by this fancy term (which
READ MOREThe angst felt by philosophers, the meaninglessness faced by even the greatest modern artists and musicians, and the rampant drug use and trail of despair and nihilism writ large in Western culture since the 1960s are some of the more obvious signs of the crisis faced by modern people. But the cause of this crisis—the
READ MOREThe most common view today of 15th-century Florentine philosopher-statesman Niccolò Machiavelli is that he was evil. Dubbed the founder of modern political philosophy, his evil reputation comes from his most famous work, The Prince, which openly endorses treachery, deceit, and backstabbing as political tactics. So, it’s no wonder that most people’s idea of Machiavelli is
READ MOREThe plot of C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce is straightforward. The narrator, who strongly resembles Lewis, boards a bus along with some others traveling from Hell to Heaven. Once they’ve arrived at their destination, the quarrelsome passengers disembark, become Ghosts, and find themselves scarcely able to bear the reality of their physical environment—even the unbending
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