Joseph Bianco > Recent Status Updates

Not exactly what I was expecting, but it's fruitful reading. So far this is dense, highly abstract metaphysical argumentation for God's existence—"God is at once both nearer than what is inmost to me and beyond what is highest in me." [...] "Si comprehendis, non est deus" (If you comprehend it, it is not God."

Well-written and measured, a mix of Hannah Adrendt's theory of totalitarianism, Gustave Le Bon's crowd madness psychology, anti-Stalinist anti-fascist Solzhenitsynism. Reading this just after finishing René Girard's The Scapegoat, Mattias Desmet's synthesis of concepts into his theory of mass formation seems to be a secularized, liberalized version of Girard's Christian theory of the Scapegoat mechanism.

The drive for immortality and the death drive are siblings, possibly twins, because they both result in annihilation of differentiation.

Basically fantastic up until the last chapter brings it down quite a few notches.