I know intelligence is not the same as moral virtue. As my mom says, IQ produced the atomic bomb. What I find, though, is that a lot of people do seem to suggest their equivalence. For example, some social scientists claim a correlation between IQ and incarceration rates.
Hear me talking for three and a half minutes about The study of self-deception on the Catholic Culture Podcast. (Interviewer Thomas V. Mirus.)
The more complex our social arrangements are, the more effort is needed to keep them running. This belonged to the common sense of social life long before it was codified in physics as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Living creatures die; so do cities, nations, and civilizations.
Recently, as we were visiting his church out of town, an acquaintance who works hard to bring in the sheaves greeted me and my wife with the friendly remark, "I like people who believe in something." I wondered: Do the people we casually describe as believing nothing literally believe nothing? Or do they believe something after all?
Hear me talking for eight minutes about Why Stoicism won't make you happy on the Catholic Culture Podcast. (Interviewer Thomas V. Mirus.)
Allow me to update a post I wrote in 2020 about Donald Trump and social class, because the topic is broader than Trump. Let me begin with what I said then.
Self: Actually, it is all about me.
Reality: Thinking and saying it make it so.
Truth: See Reality.
Sex: Okay if it doesn’t hurt anyone. Never hurts anyone.
Why can't a woman be more like a man?
Men are so honest, so thoroughly square;
Eternally noble, historically fair;
Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat.
Well, why can't a woman be like that?
Why does every one do what the others do?
