The Urgent, Immediate Danger

The Urgent, Immediate Danger: A Brief Manifesto

There are threats in America today: immediate, urgent dangers that must be countered just as urgently and just as immediately. These dangers do not, for the most part, have anything to do with the kinds of long-range trends I discussed in a recent post: they are not things that could or might happen, or even directions things are heading. They are here, and now, already prevalent, already virulent, already spreading.

No, these threats are not "Donald Trump," or "Wokeness," or "MAGAism" or "fascism," or any such thing. They are emphatically not coherent ideologies, let alone individual people. They are things much more inchoate, and much more dominant, than that. As Chesterton says, it is assumptions more than stated beliefs that define an age: and as Aristotle knew, it is habits more than opinions that make a person what he is.

This is a work of polemics: it is by design short and to the point. Please pay attention.

Neurosis and Community

There is a madness abroad, stalking the streets of America. It has captured nearly every political leader, nearly every intellectual, nearly every academic, nearly anyone, in fact, who wields any kind of power anywhere. It colors and defines their words and actions, rendering them incomprehensible and irrational and harmful. 

This madness, like most forms of insanity, is in essence simple, a basic kind of reactivity extended to become all-encompassing and overpowering. Even to call it insanity is to a degree unnecessary; it is better understood as a vice, though one not precisely found in the classical lists of Aristotle and Aquinas and Bonaventure. Like most forms of madness, it is in its nature self-focused, self-interested, self-enclosed, paranoid, and neurotic. It renders those who participate in it incapable of seeing the world, themselves, or others accurately.

If forced to put a single word to this madness, I would simply call it misanthropy. It is, in every form and every permutation, grounded in pervasive, repetitious, grinding hatred of human persons.

I predicted, nearly five years ago now, that the post-COVID age would be an unstable one, due for the most part simply to the psychological effects of any profound and unstable and far-reaching global event, to understand which I looked to the World Wars for inspiration. Hence, I predicted a sense that anything was possible, and an increase in risky and risk-averse behavior, leading to people taking extreme actions that would have been unimaginable before. 

My analysis was obviously correct so far as it went, but failed (as do most analyses) by not being extreme or specific enough. For while the World Wars (as I pointed out elsewhere) produced extreme and traumatic experiences that were also fundamentally based around discipline and regimentation and therefore a certain kind of (highly hierarchical, temporary, brutal) community, the Pandemic was obviously centered around extreme and traumatic experiences of isolation, interpersonal threat, secretive vice, and and unstable, virtual, selfish relationship. Hence, while many people responded to the World Wars by embracing any and every brutal hierarchical institution that would take them--before relaxing and breaking those institutions to pieces--people have responded to the Pandemic by fearing and hating and fleeing from and avoiding both institutions and people.

When I look around me in America, especially at people in positions of power, but extending to teenagers and churchgoers and middle-schoolers and almost every part of society, and compare what I see to what I saw before the Pandemic, the difference is obvious: virtually everyone is, at least relatively, a neurotic misanthrope. Virtually everyone, that is, is constantly frustrated with the people around them, easily annoyed by minor things, prone to sudden rages, prone to intense fear of others, prone to intense hatred of others, prone to fleeing, prone to disappearing. The discourses they participate in, whether political or social or fandom or economic or even religious, all consist largely of complaining about other people, focusing on what makes them hateful and horrible and monstrous and in desperate need of being punished or humiliated or gotten rid of. 

Politics, in 2025, is dominated by forms of hatred that are profoundly not--despite the best analyses of millennials and academics and such people--based around abstract discourses of economics or race or immigration or religion, but rather on personal fear and hatred. As I speak, Harvard professors and representatives and presidents and podcasters alike are openly sharing snuff videos and treating watching them as some sort of profound moral task. Every progressive I know spends a truly remarkable amount of their time making mean (and as a rule profoundly unfunny) jokes about the President of the United States' personal appearance and mannerisms, copied from those made day and night by the (even more profoundly and uniformly unfunny) professional comedians that have somehow become their leading intellectuals. Meanwhile, conservatives do not so much defend abstract policies as gleefully share videos of ICE agents dragging off people or bad people causing harm and begging to be punished. And, most horrifically of all, beyond and behind and above all these ephemeral political trends, the great Gender War rages unchecked through social media and online forums and dates and marriages alike, finding ever more perverted and extreme and unfair and one-sided and cruel and petty ways to break people apart and make them hate and despise and abuse one another. 

As I said, this post will be short, so I will not spend much time defending the above observations: I also don't think they require much defending. I think everyone with any degree of honesty in 2025 will simply recognize that we are, as a rule, a more hateful society than ever before; and will look into their own hearts, and recognize that they are, as a rule, a more hateful person than ever before.

Millennials and academics, during the End of History, produced very extensive analyses of what they saw as the vanishing hatreds of the past: racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Hinduphobia, transphobia, and so on and so forth. Some of these analyses were very good; some were very silly; but virtually all relied on the assumption that all such hatreds could and should be explained in abstract and academic terms, that they had origins, genealogies, that they were deeply rooted in historical narratives or institutions or intellectual positions or human biology or even the nature of reality itself.

If life in 2025 should teach us anything, it should be a very different lesson: that hatred and misanthropy are rooted, not in reality, not in the good, but in sin, which means in the first place vice, and in the second place madness. Dealing with other people positively, confronting similarity and competition, reconciling difference and contrariety, dealing with our desires for others, our fear of others, our disagreements with others, suffering from others' sins, struggling with others' vices, in short loving other people as oneself, is natural to human beings: but for all that it requires a certain set of habits and dispositions that are not acquired automatically, but by repeated action and experience, as virtues. On the other hand, misanthropy is fundamentally a vice, a vice grounded not usually in historical narratives of oppression, or even economic superstructures, but in personal sensitivity and morbidity and selfishness and fear and despair: and like any vice, reinforced by action, by habit, and by many a vicious pleasure and pain. 

Most fundamentally, a vice is by its nature irrational and indefinite. And when the vice of misanthropy is acquired, it attaches easily and naturally, not merely to those who are different from us, of different races or religions or opinions, but much more often (as Rene Girard long ago pointed out) to those who are like us, rivals for the same sought-after goods: and in the final balance it can attach to anyone and everyone who in any way threatens our morbid selfishness and sensitivity: which is to say, literally everyone.

And, perhaps most importantly, a vice is false. People are, in fact, good: even when for a variety of reasons they are threatening or annoying or even harmful to us. Reality, the world, and everything in it are good and, in themselves, enjoyable: and this something that can be noticed quite easily by anyone at any time. The vice of misanthropy is acquired, not naturally and easily, but artificially and usually at the cost of great time and effort; and is maintained and extended equally artificially. Virtue can begin anywhere, with nearly anything: and only it can overcome vice.

This vice, I fundamentally believe, is the immediate, present threat: it is here, and it is growing. It cannot be countered in the abstract, but only concretely and morally and personally, and first and foremost through the cultivation of the countervailing virtues of patience and charity and justice.

Narratives and Reality

This madness of misanthropy is made much easier by the increasingly perverse and vicious nature of modern communication, and hence of modern thought dependent on it. As I recently pointed out, I think it highly likely that the dominance of the Internet, of advertising-pornography, of contentless media, is in the process of waning, and may disappear entirely in the short and long term. Still: it is here, now, and never more powerful than at this precise moment among the powerful of this earth. Put simply, highschool students are no longer on Twitter: but the Vice President of the United States is. The more powerful the person in America today, the more likely they are to be a social-media addict: and the more likely their whole approach to the world, to thinking, to discourse, is to be dominated and defined by the terms of social media.

Hence, it is necessary to understand the fundamentally vicious and irrational form of reasoning endemic to these forms of media as practiced by powerful people and their imitators and lackeys. This form of fundamentally silly and vicious reasoning is becoming more and more widespread, alas, even among people who spend almost no time on the Internet, spread through television and political parties and speeches alike. It poses, I think, on a purely practical level, perhaps the greatest threat to the present safety and peace of the world.

If I was being an academic intellectual here, I could trace this form of reasoning ultimately to a strange kind of distorted mathematical probalism prevalent among prestigious intellectuals and their imitators when I was young: a form of reasoning that saw the objects of experience as fundamentally unreal, the epiphenomenal, ephemeral, illusory result of an invisible, indefinite field of statistical probability. 

 Male and female, I was told solemnly, were mere arbitrary statistical samplings of traits; a person's eyes spontaneously regenerating at Lourdes, I was told just as solemnly, was just a very improbable thing that did not require any particular cause or explanation; fundamentally, all knowledge and faith alike was just a statistical evaluation that certain things were more likely to be true than other things. There were no natures, no objects, no observation, no reasoning to conclusions, no cause and effect, just statistics. In other words, fundamentally what existed was not reality, was not things, but our own reasoning and sampling and narrating about things.

Taken to its logical extreme, this kind of thinking produced a rather bizarre form of smart stupidity, visible in nearly every intellectual I encountered for many, many years. People--educated people first and foremost--trained themselves to deny the evidence of their own senses, their own personal experiences, every form of knowledge and every tangible reality, provided these did not fit in with what they regarded as the statistical conclusion. If something was not very likely, it could not have happened. On the other hand, if something was clearly impossible according to everything we understood about the natures of things, it could be true regardless. If men were more likely to be violent than women, instances of female violence could not exist. On the other hand, perhaps men could get pregnant, sometimes. According to the studies, sexual violence only led to harm most of the time; anyway, violent crime was on a long-term downward trend; and statistically, most homeless people were homeless for structural economic reasons, and so buying food for a hungry person could not really help them. Et cetera.

Though undoubtedly important in shaping the early years of the Internet and Internet politics and sociability, however, I do not really think this perspective is largely responsible for our plight at the present day. Put simply, statistical and probabilistic thinking has been replaced with narrativistic and partisan thinking, and as narrativistic and partisan thinking has been supercharged by algorithmic forms of media. 

Increasingly, people do not have so much beliefs about the world, as narratives about the world: that is, inherently value-laden sequences of events in which people play set roles, teleologically designed to culminate in particular ends. Violent immigrants menace helpless natives, leading to violent vindication by the government. Sexual minorities are bullied and denied their rights by religious fanatics, leading to their vindication by rational people and/or the government. Jews are oppressed and persecuted and murdered by vicious anti-Semites, leading to their violent vindication by the State of Israel. Black people are murdered by the police due to racism, leading to their vindication through a protest movement. Black criminals get away with obvious crimes due to wokeness, leading to their punishment by heroic police officers. Woke scolds oppress normal people, leading to the vindication of the normal people and the humiliation of the woke scolds. Racist bigots oppress minorities, leading to the vindication of minorities and the humiliation of the racists. Et cetera.

I should be clear: each of the above narratives reflects, or at least is based on, things that can and do happen! They are also deliberately drawn, too, from across the political spectrum, and include narratives that appeal to my own beliefs as well as those that do not. This, however, is profoundly not the point; the point, rather, is precisely found in the fact that, in my conveying of these narratives, each and every person reading this essay immediately and naturally saw each narrative as conveying a divisive, partisan framework. And that is rather strange: for regardless of whether, say, the State of Israel is good, or American immigration policies have been well considered over the past decade, or trans activists are right about gender, it nonetheless must be true that Jews and trans people and immigrants can be and sometimes are mistreated. The idea that reality itself is somehow cleanly divided into incidents conveying and necessitating contrary moral and ethical and political visions is bizarre and horrifying, and, put simply, totally crazy; and yet I think it is increasingly how most of us see the world.

The truth is, of course, that we are not really talking about reality, about real people and incidents, so much as we are of the narratives that are made of them on the Internet; and that each narrative, as actually presented on the Internet, is not intended to convey a factual happening, but rather to communicate a particular value judgment, and indeed often a kind of religious claim; for while ethics can tell us something is right or wrong, only faith can tell us who will be ultimately vindicated, in this world or the next. 

Hence, we might say that narrativistic thinking of this sort exists not merely to communicate a particular factual happening, but rather to assert a particular ethical or religious or political view of the world. Increasingly, however, I think it is rather the other way around: namely, that narratives exist, not to convey a worldview, but rather to replace any kind of coherent or discursive ethical or political or religious account of the world. 

People, in other words, do not so much believe, say, that sexuality is not fundamentally or exclusively grounded in procreation or sexual difference or the historical institution of the family, but rather exists for personal and social fulfillment, such that people with homosexual desires must be allowed to participate in sexual activity and relationships and have them affirmed by society and the law: rather, they believe that gay people are bullied by religious fanatics, and that these religious fanatics should be punished. To counter this position, another person might assert a counter-narrative about religious people being bulled by gay people and/or woke scolds. Neither party, though, will assert a rational ethical claim; nor will either party acknowledge the rational ethical claim implied by their opponents' position. Increasingly, instead of arguing that something is right or wrong, in other words, people assert not ethical claims, not value judgments, not political ideologies, but merely narratives; and they are countered, not by arguments or refutations, but rather by more narratives.

In this sense, narrativistic thinking is inherently opposed to more straightforward discursive thinking, and especially discursive debate. If you assert a political ideology, I can rationally analyze that ideology, criticize it, and propose my own. If you assert a narrative, however, I can do little more than deny that narrative and assert my own. Hence, one can simply observe that in the present day, most debates consist of only two basic modes: either declaring one's opponents narratives fake or manufactured or overstated, or (more commonly) merely ignoring one's opponents narratives and repeating one's own narrative over and over again without modification and regardless of any response.  

Of course, in all this I am appealing to something less and less likely to be true on the actual Internet or even in real life: namely, a situation where people actually argue with each other. In a sense, we have never been a more partisan culture, but also never been a less argumentative one. What the Internet has taught most of us is not so much how to argue, but how to uncannily detect (from the vocabulary, the use of language, the atmosphere, the feel, the smell) the presence of ideological enemies: and flee. 

Indeed, it is very likely that most people reading this have already concluded, based on their training in the Internet, that they have deduced from the  narrativistic examples I selected above what I believe about various hot-button issues, and therefore which "side" I am on, and on this basis already decided whether to take my overall arguments seriously or get annoyed and withdraw without thinking about them. (I can assure you, however, dear reader, that none of the real-world examples in this post have very much to do with what I believe about ethics and politics.)

What began as a social phenomenon, however, has long since been technologically reinforced and established. Hence, what we can in fact see in the present day is not ballooning debates, but something rather different: the algorithmic separation of people into closed groups consuming entirely separate narratives. We do not have public debates over immigration in America: what we have is one person sitting around consuming narratives of immigrants oppressed by nativists, while their next-door neighbor sits around consuming narratives of natives oppressed by immigrants. When these two encounter each other's narratives, the result is very unlikely to be debate of any kind; it is much more likely to be distress, rage, and social separation.

It is no coincidence that the rise of narrativistic thinking has taken place precisely in tandem with the rise of the short video clip as the primary mode of information delivery. People in America today read less and less prose and poetry, and even watch less narrative television and longform film, than ever before: what they instead consume, whether on Twitter or Youtube or Instagram or Tiktok or even television, is endless, short video clips centering on a particular value-laden narrative. It is also no coincidence that the rise of narrativistic thinking has coincided with the rise of algorithmic entertainment more generally. As in all instances of technology, cause and effect goes both ways, but technology serves above all else to reify and extend a particular kind of will and a particular kind of thought and action and habit: and in this case, it is a profoundly vicious one. 

Still, I should say here that narratives, as I have tried to argue in the past, are fundamental to humanity and to our experience of the world. They are not in themselves vicious; indeed, they are necessary means both for human understanding of the world and for the practical acquisition of virtue. Nonetheless, they cannot and must not replace discursive reason tout court, particularly not in the areas of politics, religion, and social life, and particularly not in the highly simplistic and distorted forms increasingly prevalent on the Internet and in American public life.

To take another example, during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, I observed that all my progressive friends and acquaintances posted video clips of protesters being brutalized by police, while all my conservative friends and acquaintances posted video clips of protesters behaving badly and brutalizing bystanders and police and breaking and stealing and looking bad. To me, however, it seemed merely obvious that, in such a large-scale protest movement, both sorts of events were bound to happen, and equally obvious that the mere existence of any particular clip of a singular event did not prove anything in general about how prevalent such incidents were on either side. Even more importantly, it seemed clear to me that, even taken as a whole, all these clips were strictly irrelevant for the actual ethical questions and claims being presumably debated. If there was large-scale racial injustice involved in American policing, and if this injustice should be urgently ended, and if protests were a reasonable and effective means to end it, then the BLM movement was correct and should be supported regardless of whether some protestors were bad people or did bad things while protesting; and if the above claims were false, then the BLM movement was incorrect and should not be supported regardless of how many police officers behaved badly in dealing with protestors. Yet, oddly enough, this form of reasoning seemed entirely strange to most people I communicated with during this time: I still am not entirely sure why.

Nonetheless, as this example indicates, what is wrong with this kind of purely narrativistic thinking applied to politics is that it is inherently destructive both of common sense about the world, and of basic ethical reasoning. In the former instance, a steady diet of one-sided narratives tends to naturally override and replace people's experiences of the real world, and cause people to forget that reality, is, after all, rather complex, that all sorts of things do in fact happen, and that people's moral characters are rarely singular and unmixed. In a situation where the President of the United States is engaged in a campaign of mass deportation that involves setting quotas to deport as many as possible, it is highly unlikely that all those deported are in fact violent criminals, even if every narrative you consume has to do with the deportation of violent criminals. In a mass protest, it is unlikely that every protester is morally pure and motivated merely by a sincere thirst for justice. Even if violent crimes are truly on a downward trend, violent crimes are still occurring; and so on.

This negative effect on people's sense of reality, however, is trivial in comparison to the effects on people's actual ability to ethically reason and evaluate. Even if every protester were in fact motivated by a thirst for justice, it would still be possible for a protester to commit injustice; and such injustice should still be dealt with. Even if each and every deported immigrant were in fact a violent criminal, it would still be possible to treat them unjustly and irresponsibly, and such violations would still be matters of grave concern. Even if only one violent crime occurred this year, it would still be an injustice and would demand a response. Yet, strangely, when people consume a steady diet of partisan narratives, it is these basic ethical truths that they tend, like clockwork, to overlook or elide or forget about.

In the present day, we are a long way past even the BLM conflicts, which did at least clearly center around claims about ethics and reality. In the present day, it would be more helpful, perhaps, to simply point out that the narratives prevalent on social media and in politics are profoundly not merely a random sampling of human events, but are highly-tailored and highly-selected stories all based around nearly identical values constructed in highly simplistic terms. Nearly all the narratives prevalent in America today are stories of oppression and vindication, of wrong and vengeance, of evil and its destruction, or, perhaps most honestly, of misanthropy and its indulgence. And while these narratives certainly reflect deeply rooted human emotions and experiences, they hardly give a full picture of human life, let alone human morality and politics. 

Likewise, it can be simply noted that, just as reality itself is rich and complex, so too can narratives be; and that good works of narrative art are all grounded in truth, in reality with all its richness, and hence provide space and opportunity for interpretation, for ethical and political and social reflection, for growth in virtue, and for contemplation. And this is not true of the snuff videos and oppression porn that Americans by and large consume today. 

I think, though, if we are being honest, that we will all acknowledge that the purpose of our narrativistic thinking and of the narrative art we consume is most commonly not the grasping of truth, let alone reasoned debate and persuasion, but rather personal entertainment and the indulgence of our hatred and outrage and misanthropy. 

Our discourses do not exist to further political goals, but to indulge vice. And this is, again, an immediate, present threat, that can only be countered in immediate, personal terms.

Justice and Order

Justice is the only possible foundation for any social or political order. A person should be given what they are due, and should give others what they are due. Every person is only responsible for what they have actually done, or could and should actually have done; they can only be punished when they are proven guilty, with a punishment proportionate to their actual guilt.

Yet what is lost in narrativistic reasoning, increasingly, is any of these basic ethical and discursive claims, or any basis on which they could make sense to people. Increasingly, our politics on both Right and Left centers rather on the idea that certain people are good (by which we mostly seem to mean personally gratifying), and certain people are bad (by which we mostly seem to mean personally annoying), and the former people should be kept around, while the latter should be got rid of, by whatever means, and regardless of whether getting rid of them would result in justice or injustice.

Another way of thinking about this is to point out that American politics, on all sides, seems to be increasingly obsessed with the idea of "public order": by which people seem mostly to mean the overriding imperative of maintaining things a certain way, organizationally and/or ideologically and/or aesthetically, to please the good people, and displease the bad people, and the consequent necessity of getting rid of everyone and anyone whose existence or presence or acts poses an obstacle to this. 

Hence homeless people, being undeniably unaesthetic and annoying to most people and not included in anyone's visions of how things should be, are targeted by both Gavin Newsom and Donald Trump alike as people who must be got rid of through some form of involuntary interment and/or expulsion without worrying too much about what will happen to them or whether they have done anything wrong besides existing. 

In regards to other sorts of people, of course, there is a great deal more disagreement: should we get rid of the racist MAGA Republicans? The woke scolds? The intellectuals? The violent immigrants? The stupid people? Still, in basic conception, if not in particular targets, Trump's campaign of "deportations," taking certain kinds of people and not so much punishing them for particular acts as declaring them annoying and unaesthetic and shipping them off somewhere else, without caring particularly about whether this action is just or unjust, whether these people deserve to be treated like this, or what will happen to them and/or people in the place they are deported, is a perfect summation of an ethos widely shared among Americans of all stripes today. Meanwhile Nayib Bukele, the world's most successful contemporary dictator, has achieved grand popularity and success by arresting everyone and anyone who might have any connection with gangs and interning them in massive torture-prisons without worrying too much about whether they are guilty or innocent, whether their imprisonment and torture is just or unjust, or indeed about what will happen to them, their family and friends, or anyone else. And there are many like him waiting in the wings, in America and elsewhere.

Yet for all that, we can simply point out that if Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas and indeed every Catholic political thinker and most Enlightenment thinkers are right, then efforts to vindicate particular aesthetic orders by getting rid of people will always result in disorder and disunity, and, in short, that the triumph of public order at the expense of justice is not order at all, but rather profound chaos. If justice is the only means to unite people, then the guilt or innocence of individuals, and what they deserve or do not deserve, can never be effaced by any other consideration: and certainly cannot be effaced by people's vicious misanthropy. 

Yet if we look around us today, we see everywhere discourses fundamentally based around indulging people's misanthropy in complete disregard for justice of any kind. And this is an urgent threat, and must be stopped.

Consolation and Despair

If there is a psychological and moral root to all the above, it is merely, I think, that Americans are, for a variety of reasons, unhappy; and that Americans, even where they are not particularly unhappy, even where they are in fact doing pretty well, exist in a rather fundamental state of despair over there being any way to console anyone for their unhappiness, let alone overcome vices and evils and injustices and make themselves or others happy.

One can, again, simply note that in the present day, general discourses moral and political have never been more negative; and that this does not merely extend to negativity about partisan or political enemies, but emphatically to negativity about our own partisan sides, our own societies, our own lives, and our own selves. 

Indeed, though from one point of view, American society has never been more partisan and politicized, from a rather wider perspective we are witnessing a profound depoliticization of discourse and of life alike. Increasingly, the domain of political discourse extends only to the few issues around which there is widespread politicization; just as increasingly, there is widespread, I might even say, overwhelming agreement among all parties and classes that America is in trouble, that our politics are a mess, that partisanship is a problem, that housing is too expensive, that communities are failing, that is atomization a growing threat, that birthrates should rise, that social media and the Internet and smartphones are destroying us all. In fact, there is a large and growing number of political positions, including many of the above points, that ten years ago were fringe, and in the present day are agreed upon nearly universally by both right and left. 

And yet, though in the present day, Americans agree, I am tempted to say, more than ever before, Americans do not, by and large, consider their agreements the stuff of politics, do not think or discourse about them, and most emphatically do not do anything about them. And this is passing strange.

If there is one threat, then, that is at the root of all the threats talked about above, that is most deeply rooted and most urgently in need of being overcome, it is simply the alarming fact that Americans are in despair about their actual lives and actual political prospects and actual actions, and that what passes for politics in America today, on all sides, is for the most part not a form of political discourse aimed at accomplishing or understanding anything, but rather a form of coping mechanism, designed to console people and distract them and make them feel better for a brief and momentary period and in an illusory way.

And in this we might simply notice that if one of the things we all seem to agree on is that smartphones are bad, that what smartphones actually do is not so much to inspire us to wicked action or make us suffer, but merely provide an immediate and unsatisfying and momentary and illusory coping mechanism and distraction from our actual lives. In this, what is really wrong with smartphones, really wrong with the Internet, really wrong with all the above threats and vices and forms of madness, is merely that they prevent us being and doing what we should be and do: prevent us from grasping reality as it is and acting on it reasonably. And this is, after all, in the final balance, all that it means to be sane, and all that it means to be a human being.

In all the above cases, what we need to counter the threats to our lives and happiness and sanity is simply the ability to focus on reality rather than on madness, to consider, and to act. And to do this, we need virtue, which is to say, practice: the constant, repeated practice of patience for others' sins and faults, the bearing of others' burdens, the love and enjoyment of others' intrinsic and fundamental beauty and goodness and truth. 

If this is true, though, it is nonetheless true that one cannot learn any such thing if we are constantly practicing something totally contradictory: and especially if we are spending all our time and energy doing so.

And this, in the final balance, I firmly believe, is the absolutely immediate, urgent threat which we most all labor and suffer and strive to overcome.