Introduction-
Prehistoric man is an enigma to his modern progeny. We tend to think of life in the distant past as an unenviable thing; brutal, gloomy, and short. And, if we think of quality of life as simply the sum of material pleasures, then the hunter-gatherers undoubtedly had it rough. From the perspective of these prehistoric hunter-gatherers, however, material abundance meant nothing. Meaning was not derived from what things one owned, but what relationships one had and what contributions one could make. They needed not a thing in the world besides cohesion and community. …
Doesn’t ordinary life just sound so much better on paper?
Spend your first years in a brilliantly bright new life. Leap into the realm of education for as long as it takes to receive all the knowledge of the world you want. Do whatever one of thousands of jobs you most want to do. Explore all the most mesmerizing places and have all the most enthralling experiences when work doesn’t beckon. Find friends, find love, and through them, find meaning. Retire when you’ve grown old, and live out your days in peace.
But that’s just a fantasy; now, especially, but…
We in today’s techy age tend to forget just how similar our ancestors were to modern men. It’s understandable, of course; the world we live in today is mind-bogglingly different than the world of just a century ago. To contemplate the world before the birth of civilization is beyond just about all of us. And still, so it seems, we can connect the same dots and think up of the same stories our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Seven sisters standing together for eternity. A crown in the north. A cross in the south. …
Man is a religious animal. Although possible proto-religious behaviors have been observed in other species, like elephants burying their dead and chimpanzees engaging in bizarre social rituals, nothing compares to the intense and intricate religions fashioned by the hands of man. For countless thousands of years, the search for spirituality has been a driving force in our species’ development. Only recently did said search abruptly end. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, for it to crop up again in the historical blink of an eye. Western secularism has led to a widespread crisis of identity. Of course it has. All of…
The little lodge was a quiet place. William sat idly on his phone. It wasn’t like there was much of anything else to do. Perhaps he could read a book. He did, of course, bring several along, although he’d never been able to fully fool himself into thinking he’d get through more than one or two. It didn’t take long after he picked one out, however, that a buzzing phone brought him right back to the blinding screen. A text.
“whats the move for the weekend”
“I’m up north,” William replied, “hunting with dad. Or, at the moment, waiting around…
Our ability to know our limitations is, in and of itself, a limitation.
Mankind is a mass of lazy bastards with a sprinkling of brilliance on top. While the occasional exception unendingly strives to make something of themselves, the vast majority of humanity is content with spending their entire lives doing the absolute minimum. Of course, we can’t completely blame them; living is an arguably easier endeavor now than it’s ever been, and people seem to be naturally inclined to capitalize on whatever ease they can get. Still, everyone intuitively wants to make something meaningful of their tenure here on…
Perhaps one of the biggest setbacks for modern leftism is its lack of a spiritual or theological element. The Right has long held a monopoly over American Christianity, and recently, it’s gotten its fingers into alternative spirituality. The New Left of the 1960s flourished alongside New Age spirituality before the former went strictly secular and the latter went off the spiritual deep end. Since then, leftists have been champions of science, but for those searching for deeper meaning in a seemingly godless world, the Left has had little to offer. To stop itself from losing all those desperate for religiosity…
The link between American libertarianism and the alt-right has been discussed frequently for a few years now. It’s a worrying development for a lot of libertarians, and one can hardly blame them; nobody wants to be associated with the alt-right. Despite their protests, though, the great leap required to go from voting for Gary Johnson to marching with Richard Spencer has been made seemingly easily by vast swaths of former libertarians. This frightening pipeline is not the only one available to libertarians, however. It is this second, and much less often discussed, pipeline that provides hope that libertarians are not…
The following will mostly be an exercise in speculation. Many of the things to be brought up here are so well hidden beneath the veil of time that we may never get to know their details. It’s a dive into the deepest depths of the past — perhaps even back when man and ape were not yet totally separate — thus making it a difficult thing to speak of strictly scientifically. …
The search for the origin of all religion is rather self-explanatory in its reasoning; such a discovery would have innumerable consequences for every culture on Earth. Naturally, it’s a search that’s been undertaken for hundreds of years, but only in the most recent century and a half has it really risen in popularity. The search typically leads to one of two conclusions; that religion developed multiple times independently, or that all modern religions can be traced back to a prehistoric original religion. The latter school of thought steers its proponents toward adopting the perennial philosophy. This is of the school…
Writer of the most eclectic mix of material this side of the Mississippi. Author, 2016–2019. Blogger, 2017–2020. Columbia University, 2020–2024.