Sam Vara wrote: ↑Mon Apr 30, 2018 8:18 pm So lately, people are agitating and protesting and rioting for “progressive reform,” which for all they know wouldn’t even work if they got it. There are some people who aren’t even chronically messed up, and who weren’t even brainwashed in the Liberal Arts department of a university, who naturally assume that a globalist socialist welfare state would be a significant giant step in the general direction of Utopia. But Utopia can be found, if anywhere at all, only within one’s own mind. Habitual malcontents will never find Paradise or anything resembling it, regardless of political or economic systems, or anything else external. Rather than try to change eight billion others, just change yourself—or just observe yourself with some introspection, and learn something.
https://politicallyincorrectdharma.blog ... tence.html
This is where Mr. Reynolds lets us down.
Simply by observing oneself, one doesn't learn anything. Just like life doesn't teach lessons.
If introspection would in itself lead to something, all the Freudians and their psychoanalysis patients would be enlightened.
If Mr. Reynolds says things like this --
People can be happy in totalitarian dictatorships, or alone with no money, no food, and no friends in a wilderness (although if one is starving, or one’s baby is starving, or one is in a torture chamber, then naturally it’s very much more difficult)
then he needs to explain, on the spot, how one can be happy under such circumstances, or else he deserves to be accused of the same shallow political, utopian rioting that he's accusing others of.
Every dimwitted self-help, life-hacks blog writes things like that -- "Rather than try to change eight billion others, just change yourself". And some even offer up some ideas on how to do that.
It's a characteristic resort to utopian, romantic individualism, based on intense greed for sensual pleasures, relying on a specific, small aperture for self-observation and cognitive inconsistency.