Ezra Klein

The early 21st century is characterized by the tattooed concubine.

And these sons of Belial have the chutzpah to call it progress for women.

But this is the grammar of a lot of this, this constant, are we joking?

Are we serious?

I mean, when you talk about almost any of these people, almost any of these books, it's all the ethos of the troll where the real argument is being smuggled in, gift wrapped in irony and imagery and jokes and, oh, I'm only kidding.

And are you really offended?

Such that to argue with it has a little bit of the quality of arguing with smoke.

And in some ways that is its point.

One of the things many of these screeds say explicitly is that, you know, they're a reaction to empiricized, bloodlessly technocratic modernity.

There's an idea that to sort of cohere things into that fact-based form is to force yourself into a form of argumentation that by its very nature misses deeper truths about life.

I want to try to, because I actually, I will say I had a really quite negative reaction to a bunch of this.

The part of it that I could recognize and the part of it that I do understand why it connects to people is it is an effort to pull up ideas of the romantics, ideas from Nietzsche, into a modernity that often feels very hollow.

I mean, you talked about this, I think, as battery cage ideas.

And when he's talking about, you know, more than mere life and probably when he's talking about in the book, before I get into what I don't like about the book, the thing that he is often getting at and articulating in a way that is, you know, 4chan poetic is that there has to be something more than this.

that there has to be a way that is more authentic to be a human being, more authentic to expressing the energy of life that moves within us, that we don't know how to talk about, but we do feel, and that modernity has very little language for, particularly disenchanted modernity, than this.

And the place where the book has, I think, genuine moments of appeal and inspiration is,

is in the channeling of that sense, which is a very old sense, that there is some form of immediate experience that industrial society alienates us from.

An icon of masculinity, if there ever was one.

Well, there's a desire for the order or the perceived order of the Catholic or Greek Orthodox Church, not, I think, for the social radicalism of Jesus Christ.

I mean, yeah, this is a practical problem.