The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify? Putting it...
The Kingdom That Failed

The Kingdom That Failed

Just behind the kingdom that failed ran a nice little river. It was a clear, lovely stream, and many fish lived in it. Weeds grew there, too, and the fish ate the weeds. The fish didn’t care whether or not the kingdom had failed, of course. Whether it was a kingdom or...
The Better Angels of Our Nature

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Six Trends. To give some coherence to the many developments that make up our species’ retreat from violence, I group them into six major trends. The first, which took place on the scale of millennia, was the transition from the anarchy of the hunting, gathering, and...