Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

Because understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand

yet another business book on the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books

Podcast, we commit to reading, dissecting and analyzing the great

books of the Western canon. You know, those

books from Jane Austen to Shakespeare and everything else in

between that you might have fallen asleep trying to read in

high school. We do this for our listeners, the owner, the

entrepreneur, the manager, or the civic leader who doesn't have the time

to read, dissect, analyze and leverage insights from

literature to execute leadership best practices in

the confusing and chaotic postmodern world we all now

inhabit. Welcome to the rescuing of Western

Civilization at the intersection of literature

and leadership. Welcome to the Leadership Lessons from

the Great Books Podcast. Hello, my name is

Hasan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons from

the Great Books podcast. Episode number

one of the responses, or one of the reactions

to the perception of unrealistic expectations around social

conformity is to adopt a pose,

adopt a posture of existential cynicism.

Cynicism and existential cynicism in particular,

influenced by French philosophical thought at the end of their national

cultural experience In World War II, is a

philosophy that proposes, quote individuals create their

own meaning and purpose in a fundamentally meaningless universe

and asserts that existence precedes

essence. As the 1950s

wore on, many intellects and elites in the west, led

around by the nose by writers like Albert Camus, Jean

Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, gradually began

infecting popular culture with a

disease that began with a clinical, cynical posture

towards stifling religious conformity and that would end

with the deconstruction of almost every form of meaning down to

identity. At the end of the 20th century,

our book, today a science fiction fix up novel,

opens in a way that initially seems hopeful but then gradually descends

into an existential confirmation of indeed a

fundamentally meaningless universe. It also stands

as a critique of militarism, the use of science, technology

and post war prosperity, as well as a sidelong

blow against the specter of the potential

for mid 20th century global thermonuclear

warfare. It is a book, a collection of

stories such as it were, that desperately wants the reader to

care enough about the fate of the earth and indeed places other than the

earth to save it, but also cynically

presumes that selfishness, greed, vanity and

existential dread leading to desperate failing action may be the

last best outcome for humanity in the

end. Today, on this episode of

the podcast, we will be introducing and discussing multiple themes

from the second book by this Author that we have covered on this

show, Ray Bradbury's the Martian

Chronicles leaders. The

era, the time for adopting a cynical

pose of carefully cultivated disinterest

and carefully cultivated insincerity has passed

here at the end of the fourth turning. The people,

the teams, the organizations, even the families and communities

you are leading are hungry

desperately so for you to actually

care.

And so we open today with

overview of the Martian Chronicles. So when you pick up this book,

the copy we have is of course published by Simon and Schuster. And

so because it is published by Simon and Schuster and the copyright is owned by

them, we will not be reading very much directly from,

from the book today. However, when you pick up this copy,

I have the unabridged version. You will see,

you will note that the way this book is set up

is written in a chronological form, starting in

at least the version I have, starting in January 1999 and going

to October 2026. And

Ray Bradbury is very clever in this. He opens the. The

book by framing the

exploration, the. The act of going

out into the stars. He begins to frame it as

a. As a philosophical act going along

with this idea of existential dread that we opened with. He

frames the scientific act of engaging with the

technology of rockets and of fuel and of men

and of machine, not as a scientific act, but as

a philosophical one. And you can see that in the

quote that opens up the Martian Chronicles.

It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher. Space

travel has again made children of us all.

But of course, there's a cynical, dark tone underlying all of that. Now,

the book opens in October, sorry not to remember January of

1999 with the idea of

a quote unquote rocket summer.

As you go through the years in the stories, some of them are

longer, some of them are shorter, some of them are written from the third

person, some of them are written from the second person. But what you

begin to see is that Bradbury is building an idea

of a world. He's building the idea of

a post war world where

conformity and hope run into, at least in

the first part of the book, run directly into

the. The exegesis of going to

another planet. A different, if we're

going to frame this in religious terms, a different eschatology,

a new heaven, as one of the characters says in the book,

leaving an old Earth. But of course, in going

to that new heaven, we take with

ourselves all of our old tendencies from

Earth and we seek to create a new Earth

that's remarkably like the old Earth in a

new or on a new heavenly body. Now, there are

some challenges with this in the first third, maybe, or not even the first

third first quarter of the Martian Chronicles,

Bradbury Dwell delves into an idea that is compelling, I

think, and we talked a little bit about it on the Stranger in the Strange

land episode, both 160 and

161. You should go back and listen to those episodes. The

introduction episode was 160 and then 161 is my

my long conversation, 2 hours and 45 minutes, almost 3 hours

with with John Hill, aka Small Mountain.

Recommend listening to that. But in going

through Stranger to Strange Land,

Robert Heinlein picks up on the idea that Ray

Bradbury proposes initially in Martian Chronicles. And

I'll talk about the publication schedule of these stories in a moment here

after the first bump. But here he talks about or he picks

up the idea that Bradbury initially proposes in these stories. And

the idea is this. It is the core idea in the first quarter of the

book. Mars is not uninhabited.

Mars is not a dead planet. There were

or there are civilizations on Mars in

Bradbury's conception, and those civilizations contain,

for better or worse, what we would call entities. And these

entities have their own conception of time. They have their

own conception of space. They have their own conception of reality

and value. And of course, just as

when Europeans journeyed across

the Atlantic Ocean transcontinentally and

showed up on the shores of the New World all the way

back now, 600 years ago almost,

and encountered Native Americans for the first time,

the same encountering, the same sort of cycle of

exploration, discovery, encountering

something that is foreign and new happens when,

when humans, specifically Americans, but

humans, climb in their rockets and jet

off to Mars, they discover that there is

a whole advanced society there, a whole advanced

society of folks that are watching

and waiting for them to land on their rockets,

climb out of their rockets and go,

well, go tromping around in their cities,

in their culture, and even,

even in their Martian canals.

Sam

so let's talk a little bit about the Martian Chronicles, a little

more about the Martian Chronicles. Let's explore a little bit more about that. So

this book was published in multiple parts and at different times.

It is what is known, according to Wikipedia, as a fix

up novel. From the Wikipedia article about the Martian

Chronicles, I quote, a fix up or fix up

dash or no dash is the way you write that term

is a novel created from several short fiction stories that may or may not

have been initially related or previously published.

The stories may be edited for consistency and sometimes New connecting material,

such as a frame story or other interstitial narration

is written for the new work. Close quote.

So how did Ray Bradbury, the author of Fahrenheit

451, which we've covered on the show, as I previously mentioned, the

author of Something Wicked this Way, Comes the Illustrated man,

and a number of other. A number of other classic

science fiction and. And fantasy writings in the mid

20th century. How did Bradbury come up with the Martian Chronicles?

Well, according to what we were able to research, he was inspired

by the work of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio,

which is a book about a collection of stories about a man who

returns to Widesburg, Ohio.

The stories in the Martian Chronicles appeared in various formats throughout the

1940s and, and on into the 1960s.

Several of these stories that were included in this

compiled book, this compiled edition,

eventually wound up showing up on as radio

shows, and eventually, I believe, a couple of them even

wound up on the Ray Bradbury Theater,

which premiered in the 1980s. Even

from Wikipedia, one more time, and I quote, the Martian Chronicles was written

as a chronicle. Each story presented as a chapter within an overall

chronological ordering of the plot. Overall, it can be viewed

as three extended episodes or parts punctuated by two

apocalyptic events. Events in the book's original

edition range from 1999 to 2026.

As 1999 approached in real life, the dates were advanced by

31 years in the 1997 edition.

Close quote. And that's the addition that we have on our show. On

our show today, we have the 1997 edition

where the dates be began in January 1999 with

Rocket Summer and end with October

2026 and the million Year Picnic.

Interestingly enough, we are recording this in 2025.

So I suspect that future editions of the Martian

Chronicles will start us off maybe in

January 2030 and push us out

into December or October

of 2055. And maybe by then

in real life, maybe by then Elon or

whoever will actually have figured out how the

heck to get us to those Martian

canals.

So let's go back to the book, back to the Martian Chronicles. So I. I

want to pick up in June 2001. And the moon

be still as bright

in this one. In this story, in the first piece of the

Martian Chronicles, we begin to explore

the idea, the core idea that I'm going to talk about today for leaders,

which is this idea of the impact of

or the nature of the philosophy

of existentialism. In the story, we meet a

crew of folks who, who rocket off to Mars

from, from Earth. And inside this crew are Captain

Wilder and Cherokee and Hathaway and Sam Parkhill

and a man, a man named Spender

and Spender specifically. Jeff Spender

is a man who, well, who's a man

who is out of place. He is out of place with his crew. Matter of

fact, if we, if we looked at him through the lens of the social

socio sexual hierarchy, that is, that is

a term created by the gentleman

Vox Day, who writes on Substack, we would say that Jeff

Spender is a classic Gamma in his crew. He's

not an Alpha, he's definitely not a Sigma and he's surely

not an obedient Delta or a Bravo.

He is a. He is a guy who likes walls of text.

He's a guy who is a king in his own mind. He's a guy

who likes to be in control. And

how is this replicated? How do we see this in the story?

Well, Jeff Spender winds up wandering away from the Remain,

from the, the larger group after they, after they set a fire

and begin to begin to sort of explore the Martian

territory. A Martian territory that to them

seems empty, where they can run around and

christen things and they can, they can run around and drink

and, and carouse and have a good time.

Of course Spender doesn't want to carouse. Spender is falling

in love with the Martian landscape. Matter of fact, he loves the Martian

landscape more than he loves human beings.

And he looks at their partying, views their partying as a

sign of disrespect and disingenuousness.

Spender goes away for a week after

threatening people and then

returns and begins shooting

the folks that are in the astronauts party.

Of course, because he

winds up shooting the humans. They

then of course wind up hunting him through the

Martian landscape and up a Martian mountain

and, and the Captain towards the back end of

the story has a, has a conversation

with him. And it starts off like this at the top

of the mountain. Spender says,

because I've seen what these Martians had, was just as good as anything we'll ever

hope to have. They stopped where we should have stopped a hundred years ago.

I've walked in their cities and I know these people and I'll be glad to

call them my ancestors. They have a beautiful city there. The Captain

nodded at one of several places. It's not that alone. Yes, their

cities are good. They knew how to blend art into their living.

It's always been a thing apart for Americans. Art was something you

kept in the crazy son's room upstairs. Art was something you

took in Sunday doses mixed with religion, perhaps. Well,

these Martians have art and religion and everything.

You think they knew what it was all about, do you? For my money. And

for that reason you started shooting people? When I was a kid, my folks took

me to visit Mexico City. I'll always remember the way my father acted loud and

big. And my mother didn't like the people because they were dark and didn't wash

enough. And my sister wouldn't talk to most of them. I was the only one,

really. I was the only one who really liked it. And I could see my

mother and father coming to Mars and acting the same way here.

Anything that's strange is no good to the average American if it doesn't have Chicago

plumbing. It's nonsense. The thought of that. Oh God, the thought of

that. And then. Then the war. You heard the Congressional

speeches before we left. If things work out, they hope to establish three atomic research

and atom bomb depots on Mars. That means Mars is finished. All this

wonderful stuff is gone. How would you feel if a Martian vomited stale liquor on

the White House floor? The captain said nothing, but

listened. Spender continued, and then the other power

interests coming up, the mineral men and the travel men. Do you remember what happened

to Mexico when Cortez and his very fine good friends arrived from Spain? Spain.

A whole civilization destroyed by greedy righteous bigots.

History will never forgive Cortez.

You haven't acted ethically yourself today, observed the captain.

What could I do argue with you? It's simply me against the whole

crooked, grinding, greedy setup on Earth. They'll be flopping their

filthy atom bombs up here fighting for bases to have wars. Isn't it enough they've

ruined one planet without ruining another? Do they have to foul someone else's manger?

The simple minded windbags. When I got up here I felt I was not only

free of their so called culture, I felt like I was free of their ethics

and their customs. I'm out of their frame of reference. I thought. All I have

to do is kill all you off and live my own life.

Close quote. By the way, that's a classic gamma rant

king in his own mind. But

it's also the rant of someone who

has fully and completely imbibed the

horrors of mid 20th century

existentialism.

One of the things you have to understand if you actually want to

lead is you have to understand how to

take complicated ideas and make them very,

very simple for folks. And

you have to understand a complicated thing. Well Enough

to simplify it for people who can't follow the

bouncing ball. So I'm going to try to make this

as simple as I possibly can, because

this is incredibly important. The Martian

Chronicles is not just a science fiction fix

up novel. It's not just a collection of disparate stories

barely hanging on together, bound together

by two apocalyptic narrative threads. It's not just that.

It's Ray Bradbury working out and

talking about and introducing quite frankly to a conformist

19, mid 19, mid

1950s and mid 20th century American public.

He's introducing ideas that would eventually wind up

leading to the situation culturally

and intellectually that we have now in the United States.

Now, Bradbury couldn't see that back then because at the time his

biggest battle was the battle against what he

perceived as religious stifling conformity. Matter

of fact, the voice of Spender in that last piece that I read is the

voice, I believe, of Ray Bradbury. The frustration

with the suffocation of a conformist culture.

A conformist culture that was about to borrow blow up in the

1960s and 1970s.

And we could see this in the Martian Chronicles because it is a book

without. It's a book without a happy ending,

similar to books that

we've covered from the 20th century. On this podcast before.

Ray Bradbury's the Martian Chronicles is similar

in style and approach to

or Or. It's the book example of the rant by the

great Charlie Kaufman, played by Nicholas Cage in the movie

adaptation. And in that

movie, Charlie Kaufman, again played by Nicholas Cage,

goes to a screenwriting seminar held by

the great Robert McKee, played by the

inimitable who never mails it in, Brian Cox.

And Brian Cox stands on a stage and starts talking about how to, you know,

write a screenplay, how to write a script, how to write anything, basically.

And Charlie Kaufman is of course experiencing writer's block. And

Charlie stands up and he, he has this great line,

right, that he asks Mr. McKee, which of course sets up Mr.

McKee for having a massive rant about

the meaning of writing a rant that's quite frankly

anti existentialist. The question

that launches this rant is this,

what do you happen? Or what do you. How do you write a story

where the writer is attempting to create something where nothing

much happens, where people don't change, they don't have

any epiphanies, they struggle and are frustrated and nothing is resolved?

More a reflection of, quote, unquote, the real world.

Kaufman asked this question and McKee of course responds

by saying, why would I waste two hours of my precious

time to observe the real world.

I come here to escape the real world.

This is the tension that's evident in the Martian Chronicles. And one of the things

that's imbued in it from the real world is this,

this existential dread, this, this

sense that there can't be any

change, there can't be any epiphany. There is no meaning

and nothing is resolved. The post

war 1950s in America was a time of,

in people's memory that was inflated in

different kinds of ways, both by people who are temperamentally cynical and people

who are also temperamentally naive. The

cynics, 80 years later look back at post

war, the post war 1950s in America and

they hold that the mid 20th century was a time of

naive optimism, buoyed by military power

and of course, enforced cultural conformity.

And of course, the naive, for their part, believe that the mid 20th century was

a time, to paraphrase some, Garrison Keeler in that great

NPR show, A Prairie Home Companion quote, where all

the women were strong, all the men were good looking and all the children

were above average. But inside

even A Prairie Home Companion lies existential

dread, lies the idea that even though the women are good

looking and the children are well behaved and above average,

and even though the men are strong, that there's no

meaning there. What can we get from that?

What. What is the meaning behind that? And this is the

same challenge that Charlie Kaufman is struggling with in Adaptation.

Made. Made in the early 2000s, right,

the seeds of all that were planted in the 1950s by

French existential philosophers like Jean Paul Sartre and Simone

de Beauvoir and of course, Albert Camus.

The horror of the success of French existentialist belief

systems that captured elite thought and then drifted down

into the masses in the 60s and 70s was that it

eroded the foundation of spiritual belief in a

transcendent reward in exchange for materialism,

commercialism and individualism in the here and now. And in

that exchange, that exchange, of course led to

nihilism and

atheism. Or if not atheism,

at the very minimum. Maybe not agreeing that God

is dead, but sort of nodding along when the statement is made,

we can't lay all this at the feet of Ray Bradbury. Of course, it's too

much weight to put on the Martian Chronicles to carry all this, but it is.

The book does serve as an

example of what existential dread

can look like wrapped up in technological

sophistication and cultural

barbarity.

SA

Back to the book, back to The Martian Chronicles

by Ray Bradbury. So one of the more

curious episodes or short stories

or short pieces in this fix up novel from Bradbury

that will set up my next point that I think is, is important for leaders

to pay attention to is the story from June

2003 in the, in

this edition, the 1997 edition that I have of the Martian Chronicles.

And it is a story called Way in the Middle of the Air.

And it was sort of one of the more

surprising stories that I ran

across here in the Martian Chronicles as a

reader of science fiction. It is a

story about,

well, it's a story about all of the black people,

all of the African Americans

getting their money together, getting a rocket,

getting on the rocket and leaving Earth.

Yeah, I kind of didn't expect this

story dropped in the middle of this collection. And it,

it stands out because number one,

it seems that it's Ray Bradbury's attempt to deal

with segregation, deal with

Jim Crow, deal with things

he was reading about that were occurring in the south

in the 1950s, and of course the attempts by,

by folks like Martin Luther King Jr. And other civil rights activists to

desegregate the South. But of course,

it is a story written from a long way

away and written, of course, with the tools that

Bradbury had at hand. Now, Bradbury was not

a political commentator, nor was he a

social commentator, but he could put politics

and social commentary into his writings, as he already has

demonstrated with Spender and with other stories here in this

collection. But it jumps out most notably here

in this story, Way in the Middle of the Air.

What jumps out to you also is the

way in which the white people respond

to or react to the as

it's framed here, Steady river,

just to quote here from just a second, the river

flowed black between the buildings with a rustling creek and

a constant whispering shuffle. It was a very quiet thing with a great

certainty to it. No laughter, no wildness, just a

steady decided and ceaseless flow.

Teece sat on the edge of his hardwood chair. If one of em so much

as last, by Christ, I'll kill him. The men waited.

The river passed quietly in the dreamful noon. Looks like

you're gonna have to hoe your own turnip, Sam. Grandpa chuckled. I'm

not bad at shootin white folks neither. Tease didn't look at

Grandpa. Grandpa turned his head away and shut up his

mouth. And of course people,

the people sitting on the porch, the men, the white men sitting on the porch,

do attempt in particular Samuel Tees do

attempt to stop the black people from leaving,

as he says here, all over space jerked out of rockets

like so many minnows hit by a meteor, by God. Space full of meters, you

know that sure. Thickest buckshot powy shoot him down.

Tin can rockets like so many ducks. So many clay pipes. Old

sardine cans full of black cod. Banging like a string of lady fingers. Bang, bang,

bang, bang, bang. 10,000 dead here, 10,000 there. Floating

in space, around and around Earth, ever and ever cold and way out.

Lord, you hear that? You hear that? You there. The

rage, right, of the white man being denied

his quote, unquote, niggers who are getting in a

rocket and going away. The river was broad

and continuous. Having entered all cotton shacks during the hour, having

flooded all the valuables out, it was now carrying the clocks and the

washboards, the silk bolts and curtain rods on down to some

distant black sea. High tide passed. It was 2 o'.

Clock. Low tide came. Soon the river was dried up. The town was silent. The

dust settling in a film on the stores, the seated men, the

tall hot trees. Silence.

By the way, there's something also that's interesting in the story, Way

in the Middle of the Air. It kind of reminds you

in a way that I'm sure Bradbury

intended because he was quite well read. He got all of his

education out of libraries. It reminds you

of the leaving of the

Jews from Egypt and in the book of Exodus,

a similar kind of stream of humanity

leaving oppressors while they

basically pay for

the oppressed to leave. Bradbury

clearly liked this idea. And in this,

in this story it sticks out because,

well, most science fiction tends to,

at least most American science fiction written during the mid 20th century,

tends to ignore race, tends

to set up a world where

racial injustice, and we saw this on television

in Star Trek, where racial injustice has just

somehow faded away without any. Any

details as to how exactly

we got there.

So what are we to take from that little piece from

way in the middle of the air? What are we to take from the river

of black people leaving the south, getting on a rocket,

and much like the Jews in the Exodus story,

going to the promised land of Mars. By the way, there's another

story, the. The other apocalyptic event that occurs.

A nuclear war. 20 years later, 22 years

actually, after the black people leave the South, a nuclear

war occurs. And Earth sends out a signal,

asking or requesting or

demanding that depending upon your perspective, that

all the humans on Mars return home. And

of course, all the humans on Mars dutifully do return

home, only to die in an Atomic war

again, more existential dread now capped with cynical

irony, of course. In

my estimation. I wondered, did all the

black people get on the rockets to go back

or did they just stay on Mars?

One of those unanswerable questions. But I like to imagine that

they wouldn't have gotten back on the rockets because why would you want to go

back home after 20 years? What would make you think that it would be better?

Besides, you would have had 20 years to set up a civilization, right? You would

have had 20 years to set up a Liberia on

Mars. I'm sure it all

worked out anyway. That's that whole,

like, cynical, like, lack of sincerity thing. I should actually say

it probably did work out. I should probably say that

I'm glad that they left. I should probably say

that everything

works out in the end.

This is one of the challenges, one of the curses of our time. And I

actually just sort of role modeled it there. I actually just sort of demonstrated it

there in my comments. The major

curse in our time is that we can,

we could spot actually, we're stunningly good at

spotting hypocrisy in leaders and in institutions and

in ideas. We're stunningly good at

cynically pointing out that hypocrisy, sometimes even

stunningly good at spotting it and pointing it out in ourselves. But we

are less. We are less good.

We are less able to actually be,

actually exhibit the quality of sincerity.

Sincerity, for better or worse, is linked culturally and socially

in America to the same

cockeyed optimism that led American people

to go west. Right? Go west, young man, go west. Right?

And of course, it is linked to the

cockeyed optimism that allowed people to,

particularly white people, if we're going to be blunt about it,

to accomplish the tenets of Manifest

Destiny, right? Which in

our benighted time. That's the second time I've used that term on this

podcast today. In our bedided time, we

culturally deride. We deride Manifest Destiny.

We deride cockeyed optimism. We look at that

as a sign of naivete and of being a

sucker. Culturally,

Americans perceive a lack of ulterior motives in people and especially in

leaders, and a lack of guile, a lack of deception seat

as a sign of naive trust in the ability to be,

quote, unquote, taken as if all of life

were a massive confidence game and somehow we

are all the marks.

But I think, and I take

this from the Martian Chronicles, I think Bradbury

desperately wanted to believe.

So did Fox Mulder many years later on that great Horry show from the

1990s, the X Files. And Bradbury wanted to

believe not just in Mars being full of Martians or

in racial animus disappearing in interpersonal relationships in

America. He sincerely wanted to believe

that sincerity, that cockeyed optimism

itself, would somehow be rewarded by, in this

material existence, and

that we could get that reward

without dread, without complication.

And honestly, and this is probably the

1950s thing, without that much cultural effort.

Oh, and of course, that we could get it without religion and without an

appeal to a transcendent or higher

form of meaning.

I think we can get to sincerity. I think we

can achieve cockeyed optimism, but I do not think

we can do that without belief, without

faith in a transcendent God.

So what are we to make of all of this?

I've tossed a couple of ideas out at you. I've talked a little bit about

existentialism. I've talked a little bit about nihilism.

I've talked a little bit about cultural sincerity

at a leadership level. What are we to take from this? How

are we to bring some ideas from the Martian

Chronicles forward and really apply them in our own

lived leadership lives in ways that actually make

sense? How are we to do that

in 2025, one year away

from, you know, the million year silence that,

that Bradbury talks about or the

Million Year Picnic, or one year away from the Million Year Picnic that

Bradbury talks about or addresses in his book?

Well, I think we have to have a return

to the old strong gods.

I'm not talking about the pagan gods, right? I'm not talking about the pagan gods

of Pan or Zeus or Jupiter or Athena or any

of the Viking gods or any of the Hindu gods or any of the other

nonsense. I'm not talking about a return to paganism. I, I think that way,

that way lies more cultural barbarism just at scale

with technological sophistication.

I think we have to have a return to the old strong gods

of sincerity. Sincerity

is the quality of being free from pretense, deceit, or

hypocrisy. And in leadership, it is the

antidote to the poison of cultured cynicism and even

worse, deconstructionism that has annihilated the

depth of meaning in America. We

have to rebuild the foundations of meaning. I'm not the first

person to say that we're in a meaning crisis. Matter of fact, I brought up

that meaning crisis many times on this show. It's one of the reasons I do

this show. I want to provide people with books

that can point them to meaning.

Or books that can point them to what the forces are

that are destroying or have destroyed meaning.

But we have to rebuild. We have

to stop deconstructing. We've deconstructed enough.

We've deconstructed cynically and nihilistically and

atheistically. And to what end?

What exactly has it gotten us?

The only thing left to do is to turn back to sincerity.

Sincerity and traditions, sincerity and families,

sincerity and community. Sincerity and interpersonal

relationships between you and your fellow man.

One point that is worthwhile to make

people do get confused on empathy is not the same as

sincerity. Empathy is sold quite a bit in our culture these days.

It's the gloss that's put over everything, particularly the

gloss that's put over, you know, approved positions or

by the professional managerial class or

the normies. Sincerity,

I'm sorry, not sincerity, but empathy. Empathy is marketed to

us, but not sincerity. Empathy, of course,

is weaponized against conscientious people in

order to manipulate those same conscientious people into

supporting things that go against. Go directly against their

best interests. But sincerity,

well, sincerity can only be mocked by the forces of

nihilism or deconstructionism or cynical

disinterest and dismissed. Of course,

both empathy and sincerity are not

the same thing. And we need to understand

and recognize the difference between the two of them.

Sincerity, of course, can't walk along by itself. It has to

be accompanied by some friends and.