The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment

by David Mamet

The Hebrew Bible is the record of the growth of the state from the family. The family is the Jewish, religious polity. Judaism is a home-based religion. Chapter by chapter, mankind’s development is shown in the Torah through the family dynamic. Cain slays Abel out of jealousy; Abraham almost sacrifices Isaac; Jacob steals Esau’s birthright; his sons kidnap and abandon Joseph.

The Bible’s last purely familial exchange is that between Moses and his stepgrandfather, Pharaoh. This will be familiar to anyone who has grown up in a broken family.

Moses’s power is depleted by age, and death spares him from the horror of his people’s behavior in the Promised Land.

For myth is the expression of an otherwise ungraspable perception; it grows from necessity and persists as it is operationally useful. When it is supplanted as unreasonable, blasphemous, or absurd, it creates the chaos allowing for new hegemony, and, thus, inevitably, new myth.*

The great successes in show business have books written for them, recounting confected stories of an unusual, difficult childhood, and allow their name and image (but not their cash) to be used to promote various causes they presume would increase their Fame.

And there is a difference in degree but not in essence in asking, “Wait, where did the tax money go?” and “Why am I paying you a premium to buy your second-rate beer?” Each is the plaint of a chump who has not quite put himself wise.

am a snakebit lover of language, the more obscure the better. The cutout between a knife’s blade and its ricasso is called the choil.

will explain why few can write dramatic dialogue: they have forgotten that human beings never speak to say what we “mean,” but only to get what we want.

Nor do we want no cynics, and God forbid I should admit (correctly) to the label; I who, to the contrary, am merely possessed of that removed wisdom available only to those of us who have lived too long, and survived our mistreatment by the Fates (whatever superficial evidence might erroneously suggest itself to the impartial observer).

For the last four years Israel has been the Leader of the Free World.

“we must have looked to them like grasshoppers, and that is how we seemed to ourselves in our own eyes.”

Since the actually operative threat was not global warming, Islamophobia, the Supreme Court, Donald Trump, the police, or the Border Patrol, but exclusion from the herd.

The superrich, academia, Islamists, Marxists, communists, and the media have colluded to suppress the true and suggest the false.

would rational people vote to destroy their borders, their cities, their jobs,

and their children? For the same reason the sick family must tolerate pedophilia rather than its revelation: the co-opted liberal electorate was terrified that any deviationism would result in destruction of its protective unit. As it would.

the energy devoted to accommodating monstrous lies, the mind awards them the preferred status of truth, as the codependent has paid a huge price from them: his self-respect. The truth of a proposition can be debated by

The last four years have seen the attempted suicide of the West.

Why would she have wanted to turn the page on four years of the Biden administration, of which she said she would do nothing differently?

The transition from party-line liberal to reasonable citizen—one dedicated to individual rights, rather than party control in the hope of beneficence—generally involves some degree of shame.

We understand ourselves not primarily as Republicans or conservatives but as

“we the people,” and that it is not the job of government to “unite the people,” but to enforce those laws which will permit us to work out their individual destinies. This is the simple essence of conservatism.

This heroic task, as it is in opposition to the Forces of Darkness, can be attempted only through the Power of Unity.

Politicians learn to incite rage, since voters, being human, may prefer it to the fear to which they have been incited as a preliminary—or which they have intuited in response to accelerating social change.

The frightened individual, reduced by a knowledge of his own powerlessness, can be offered the upgrade to rage only as a member of the group.

it allows the politician, having hit the right note, an endless exploitation, since the cause being imaginary, there is no danger of a cure.*

but no politician (even the most starry-eyed, after a week in office) is confused about his necessary relation to the truth.

Napoleon said that will is to all other factors in war as ten-to-one.

Nobody in any school knows how to write a screenplay, and directing can only be learned through on-set observation, trial, error, and trauma.

To place

in the limelight a great number of people who would ordinarily be chambermaids and chauffeurs, give them unlimited power and instant wealth, is bound to produce a lively and diverting result.”

How many films have the criminal pulling “one last job,” after which he would retire? Doesn’t he always die at the end of the film? Yes. What’s the lesson: there is no final job, the only possible end to his ambition is death. For to matriculate out of his beloved life, to him, is death.

The Victorian obsession with women-in-peril and so of female unsexuality (what else is the woman-in-peril genre?) was actually the assertion of the opposite: that women, being human, were like men in being sexual. Its denial was its assertion.

Christian and Muslim citizens across the country rejected the Democrats and voted as Americans, for American power, and so for peace. They saved the Jewish State.

The Democrats were also the party of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and later, “affirmative action” and its bastard child, DEI, and anti-Semitism.

One cannot have a country without borders. One can have one where the government mandates sexual indoctrination of children, blacklisting, persecution of political opponents—but that country will not be that United States of which we are citizens.

As Rebecca West writes in her masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “There are better things in life than fighting, but they are better only if their doers could have fought had they chosen.”

Form is the dramatist’s true friend. Unchecked, he will subject us to those things he loves, whether or not they are interesting, and to theories in which he believes, but which in the theater and film are an imposition.*

(Mencken called them brokers in pillage, which is a coarser but more accurate description.)

I grew

up with the constant anxiety of the first generation faced with the actual threat of instant annihilation—the eschatologist’s dream made real. Our children and grandchildren inherited the second instrument of the final days: instant global communication. What was and is spread instantly? Fear and fury. (Who, of what organization, ever communicated instantly to an anxiously awaiting world, “Things fine”?)

When away from our devices we become anxious, just like the smoker,

We recur to the device to allay our anxiety: it is frequently anxiety that the world is ending.

that committee of one-half of the populace that shares our horror at “the way things are.”

commitment to “diversity” is essentially a game of inverted charades—the white team is challenged to portray some rendition of apology, the Black team rage. The idea sought is preassigned but points are awarded to the most innovative portrayals. The game is irreducibly simple, but the stakes are enormous, as if one played Old Maid for the lives of one’s family.

Pacific Northwest Indians celebrated the potlach, a periodic feast, which involved

setting fire to all they owned. Should we think the practice ludicrous or savage, we might

find its like closer to home. Christians teach that God sa...

He found most precious. Our Judeo-Christian biblical tradition is laced with sacrifice, from the extensive Levitical prescriptions to the homilies of philanthropy and g...

we may attempt a generalized human understanding of the phenomenon that gave rise to religions. That is, fear.*

not that his opponents are wrong, but that they are unclean.*