Pastless and Futureless /  by Nathan Jones

“[He is] a pastless futureless man, born anew at every instant. The instants are points which organize themselves into a line, but what is important is the instant, not the line. [He] has in a sense no history. Nothing follows from what has gone before. He is constantly surprised. He cannot predict his own reaction to events. He is constantly being overtaken by events. A condition of breathlessness and dazzlement surrounds him.”
— Donald Barthelme in Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning (1968)
“To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future.”
— Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism (1979)

Public Health Needs a Taste of Its Own Medicine /  by Nathan Jones

The inimitable Vinay Prasad:

Post-COVID we need to seriously talk about setting restrictions. But not on people. We need to place restrictions on public health and things done in the name of public health. We cannot allow individuals who are poor at weighing risk and benefit and uncertainty to coerce human beings, disproportionately the young and powerless (waiters/ servers) to participate in interventions that have no data supporting them, for years on end.

Reading de Jouvenel under martial law in Canada /  by Nathan Jones

"On Power" by Bertrand de Jouvenel

A poignant and illuminating experience. The trenchant prose shines with wisdom.

Man, in love with himself and made for action, rises in his own esteem with every extension of his personality and multiplication of his faculties. The leader of any group of men whatsoever thereby feels an almost physical enlargement of himself. His nature changes with his stature. … He is the man of destiny.

Command is a mountain top. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience. The passion for order and the genius of construction, which are part of man’s natural endowment, get full play there. The man who has grown great sees from the top of his tower what he can make, if he so wills, of the swarming masses below him.

Are the ends which he sets before himself for the weal of society? Possibly. Are they in conformity with his desires? Often. And so the leader easily convinces himself that his one ambition is to serve the whole, and forgets that his real motive-spring is the enjoyment of action and expansion.