Dismissing every counterexample to a reigning narrative as “anecdotal” is just one of the tactics of pseudo-argumentation that sustains the regime of lies and bs under whose aegis we labor.

Rogan is anything but a CNN or FOX anchor telling you, by inclusions and omissions, by intonations and eye-rolls, what you should think. Rogan does not pretend to possess the kind of authority over his audience that would allow him to tell them what they ought to believe. He is not a professional reporter. Thank God. He’s just a damned good conversationalist.

It is difficult to think one’s way out of an ideology. Like wisdom, ideology gives logical and narrative coherence to a lot of disparate experiential data. And ideologies are paradigmatic, so that one feels a kind of intellectual obligation not to discard his scheme without adopting another. When faced with mounting anomalies, data that doesn’t fit the narrative, the ideologue can always resort to, “Well...what’s your alternative?”

Being, at the time, a fellow devotee of anarcho-capitalism, I was taken aback, and asked him to elaborate on these “problems.” That he could make only vague statements irritated me, and confirmed my impression that he was just being soft-headed.

Isn’t it usually the case that a new style emerges precisely among a relatively small number of artists, writers, musicians, athletes, or thinkers? It is from these small unities that ingredients of a larger unity grow and flower. What we call culture is in fact that the product of many small “gardens.”

The wholesome post-postmodern man will approach the world like a small child who, whenever he comes across a good thing, picks it up, and tastes it, and smells it, and admires it, and stores it away “for later.”

In my opinion, it’s always better to take the good you find, when you find it. The real problem for us is that taking the good is insufficient. After you find a dollop of virtue, you need to put it somewhere.