At a conference several weeks ago, a federal judge told me that some of the defendants in his court weep -- not when they hear their sentence, which would not be surprising, but when they hear the pre-sentence report.

Mondays are reserved for the perplexities of students.

Question:

If the most general principles of the natural law are at some level known to everyone, why is it so incredibly easy to disobey them?

Reply:

I commented yesterday that widespread cultural adjustment to nihilism has happened before, for Buddhism is the nihilism of the East.

Western nihilism is different.  We don’t follow the Noble Eightfold Path, because we no longer admire anything noble.  Despite a few superman pretensions, ours is a nihilism for the vulgar.

Nihilism is the belief that everything is meaningless.  Usually this belief is coupled with the view that nothing we perceive is even real – that the world is a mocking veil of illusion.