Mental Middlemen
5th May 2021
Severian is delightfully dyspeptic today.
Back in the worst decade (heretofore) in human cultural life, the 1990s, smarmy parents and their toothachey kids started sporting these fat rubber bracelets emblazoned WWJD: What Would Jesus Do? It’s an attitude I wish more so-called Christians would embrace these days — especially the parts where He tells everyone to buy a sword, and beats the shit out of the moneylenders — but that’s not important right now. Rather, annoying though WWJD? was, it was a useful heuristic. If you’re not sure how to act in a given situation, you could do a lot worse than picking a figure you admire and running your options through that filter — what would Jesus do? Or Socrates or Marcus Aurelius or Julius Caesar or whomever.
Those readers on life’s back nine will no doubt recognize the above as “what that whole ‘Great Books’ thing was supposed to be about,” but again, that’s not important right now. The important thing is that our degenerate, illiterate, quick-fix culture did what Leftists always do to anything beautiful: Kill it, gut it, then dance around in its skin, demanding respect. Instead of wondering why a real person would act in a given way in a given situation — the original point, of course, of WWJD — we were instructed to simply ape their behaviors, and never mind the whys.