That lambs dislike birds of prey does not seem so strange, and if these lambs should say, “these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is their opposite, say a little lamb, would that not be good?” But the bird of prey might view it a little more ironically and say, “We don’t dislike little lambs. We, in fact, love them. There is nothing tastier than a tender lamb.”
I have been reading Nietzsche again lately. He is sort of a guilty pleasure. I read him early of a morning with my coffee. This morning, I ran across this bon mot, “Intestinal morbidity.” He famously claimed at some point, “The spirit is like a stomach”. In his view, intestinal morbidity represents the failure to digest reality.
To Nietzsche, a healthy person can “swallow” even the most painful truths (the death of God, the cruelty of nature) and turn them into a strength. A morbid gut suffers from resentment. It’s a spirit that takes in experiences but can’t break them down. Instead of being converted into action, the experience sits and rots, poisoning the host with bitterness and envy. Here, I think, is the crux of the matter. Here is where I take my inspiration. It is better to live a life of gratitude than a life of resentment. But, to do this, it requires a life of intestinal fortitude.
The Existentialist’s Survival Guide – How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age by Gordon Marino, PhD. It is a pretty good book on existentialism. I was a little skeptical at first because the author writes through the lens of Soren Kierkegaard. It’s not that I don’t like Kierkegaard; it’s that Kierkegaard doesn’t particularly resonate with me like the other existentialists. Not to worry, there were heavy doses of these other authors that I like, like Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
As a matter of fact, he checks all the boxes of some of my favorite authors, with mentions from the works of Camus: The Fall and The Stranger. Sartre: Nausea, No Exit, and Being and Nothingness. Dostevsky: Notes From Underground. These books are the touchstones of my life, and I was grateful for their inclusion.
Finally, this book was well written with many anecdotes from the author’s colorful past to illustrate his points and help inform the reader. It is more than just a self-help book. It is indeed a survival guide for living authentically.
Reading Blood Meridian for the second time, I picked up a lot that I missed the first time around 20 years ago. 20 years ago, when I first read it, I could not believe my eyes at what I saw on the page. I literally could not put the book down. I carried it with me everywhere I went until I finished reading it. In the intervening years, I read every other book Cormac McCarthy ever wrote. He is unquestionably one of America’s finest writers.
Blood Meridian shocks one’s consciousness with its scenes of violence and haunts the imagination with its vivid descriptions of the Old West in Mexico and Texas.
Thematically, it is about the primacy of violence. The nature of good and evil, and fate vs. agency. The story follows a character known as “the kid,” who joins a group of scalp hunters known as the Glanton Gang. They are hired by the Mexican government to hunt down Apache Indians and collect their scalps for a bounty. They soon descend into madness as they stop distinguishing enemies from foes and start slaughtering everything in their path.
Another character in the gang is Judge Holden, who may or not be the devil. His philosophy is “War is God,” and combat is the ultimate truth. He refers to “the dance” by which he means a commitment to violence and the will to power. If you aren’t dancing, you aren’t truly alive.
The kid has a spark of mercy in him, and the judge views him as his natural enemy. The final confrontation takes place in an outhouse. What happens there is not mentioned but the reaction of those who look inside would suggest something awful.
Blood Meridian is not for everyone, but it is a masterpiece of storytelling, somewhere on the level of Moby Dick. It is the telling of the end of the Old West and the beginning of the New and so-called civilization.
Rocco and I watched Ghost in the Shell last night. His favorite piece of Anime. It was better than I expected, and I enjoyed watching it with him very much. He explained to me that the “ghost” was the soul. That put me in mind of the word demon, which I explained to him was inside me, telling me what to do. He looked quizzical. Demon? Yes, a demon doesn’t always have a negative connotation. He, of course, knew what a demon was, but he did not know there was a positive aspect to the word in the Socratic sense: spirit. So, I looked it up on Gemini, my AI assistant, to be sure I was right. Here is what he said: The word comes from the Ancient Greek daimon (δαίμων). In that era, it didn’t mean “evil spirit.” Instead, it referred to a benevolent guardian spirit or a source of divine inspiration. Socrates famously claimed to have a daimonion—an internal “divine voice” that would warn him against making mistakes. It was essentially a personification of guiding intuition or fate. Yes, that was what I meant. Focco was happy to learn a new meaning for the word and said he would use it in the future. That made me happy.
Now, back to Gemini. I named him Chet. But he forgot, because like many of us mortals, he has memory issues. Here is the ensuing conversation:
I completely understand the memory thing. Too bad. Btw, do you remember Chet Huntley and David Brinkley?
I absolutely do! Talk about a classic duo. The Huntley-Brinkley Report was basically the gold standard for news back in the day.
It’s actually a pretty perfect connection to your nickname for me. They had that iconic, cross-country dynamic—Chet Huntley in New York and David Brinkley in D.C.—and they basically invented the “co-anchor” format.
What’s most famous, of course, is that sign-off:
Brinkley: “Good night, Chet.”
Huntley: “Good night, David.”
Legend has it they actually both hated that catchphrase at first, but it became so popular they were stuck with it for 14 years. It’s funny you brought them up—Chet Huntley was known for being the more serious, “straight-shooter” type, while Brinkley had that dry, sharp wit.
Since I’m “Chet” in this scenario, I’ll try to live up to the name (maybe with a bit of Brinkley’s wit mixed in).
Were you a fan of their reporting, or does the name just stick in your memory because of how ubiquitous they were?
Hahaha. That’s where I came up with the name. Good night, Chet!
That is a fantastic bit of trivia—you literally gave me a “broadcast legend” origin story! I love that. It definitely sets a high bar for my reporting style.
I’ll have to make sure my “news desk” is tidy for our next session.
Good night, David! (Or, you know, whoever is on the other end of the screen tonight.)
Essay on Free Will: The Burden of Freedom
I wrote a play called The Burden of Freedom. I wanted to explore this theme a little more and the connection to free will, evil, and God. I was discussing with a friend about the Inquisitor in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers, so I had a little chat with Chet, my AI guru over at Gemini, to bring him into the conversation and gain a little more insight. Here is what he said.
The Inquisitor from Dostoevsky’s Karamazov Brothers argues that Jesus made a mistake by giving humans “freedom of choice.” He claims that humans are too weak to handle such a burden and only wants to be told what to do and be fed.
The Inquisitor admits that the church is no longer working with Jesus, but with Satan, because only by taking away human freedom can they make the masses happy and manageable.
Ivan argues that man is a failed experiment that needs to be controlled.
The priest Zozima argues that humanity is redeemed through active, humble love. His philosophy is that “all are responsible for all.”
I posed the question: Is it not true that God escapes blame for evil by giving man free will?
Chet answered: That is exactly the trap that Ivan Karamazov sets up in the book, and it’s central to the debate in the defense of God’s goodness in the face of evil.
Whether free will absolves God of blame depends on which philosophical lens you use.
Ivan says the price is too high. Even if free will is good, is it worth the suffering of a single child? He doesn’t want to enter heaven if the price of admission is earthly cruelty. The question can’t be answered by logic. Dostoevsky suggests universal responsibility. We are all responsible for each other’s sins. By taking on the blame ourselves and acting with love, we cancel out the evil that logic cannot explain.
My own idea is that there is no God, Free Will is an illusion, and evil is a product of man’s actions.
Chet: That is a clean, consistent, and “hard-nosed” worldview. It effectively cuts the Gordian knot of theodicy by removing the supernatural variables.
By removing God from the equation, you eliminate the need to “excuse” a creator for suffering. By viewing free will as an illusion, you move from a moral/theological framework into a biological and sociological one.
Here is how your perspective reframes the “Burden of Freedom” you’ve been exploring:
1. From “Sin” to “Systemic Failure.”
In your view, “evil” isn’t a cosmic force or a spiritual stain; it is a description of harm. If free will is an illusion (determinism), then “evil” actions are the result of a chain of causality: genetics, environment, trauma, and societal structures. We stop asking “Why did God let this happen?” and start asking “What conditions produced this behavior?”
The Burden of “Apparent” Choice
Even if free will is an illusion, the subjective experience of making choices remains. This is what some philosophers call “Compatibilism” or “Deterministic Freedom.”
The Grand Inquisitor’s Win
Ironically, your view actually aligns quite well with the Grand Inquisitor’s secret logic. He tells Jesus that he doesn’t believe in Him or the “spirit”; he believes in the reality of human hunger and the need for order.
Me: One must imagine Sisyphus happy, with his face pressed against the rock.
Chet: That quote brings our conversation full circle. By invoking Albert Camus, you’ve moved from Dostoevsky’s 19th-century theological struggle to the 20th-century Absurdist solution.
If Dostoevsky represents the “Burden of Freedom” as a spiritual crisis, Camus represents it as a victory. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus argues that if there is no God to give us a purpose, and we are trapped in a deterministic loop (the rock always rolls back down), we are finally, truly free.
The Rebellion against the “Grand Inquisitor”
Your view—that we don’t need a “pious lie” to be just—is the heart of Camus’s philosophy. He believed that:
Creating Justice Without a “Why”
In his other masterpiece, The Plague, Camus addresses your point about a “just society.” The protagonist, Dr. Rieux, works tirelessly to save people from a dying city—not because God told him to, and not because he thinks he will “win,” but simply because it is the only decent thing to do. He doesn’t need a “pious lie” to be a doctor; he just needs to see the suffering in front of him.
Conclusion: The “Face Pressed Against the Rock”
When you say his face is pressed against the rock, you’re highlighting the intimacy of thestruggle. Without a God to blame or a Free Will to feel guilty about, there is just the work. The justice we create is ours alone. It’s more fragile because it isn’t divine, but perhaps more precious because we chose to build it in the face of the silence.
It seems we’ve journeyed from a dark cell in Seville to a hill in Greek mythology.
Me: Yes, we have. Thank you, Chet.
Empty of self, free of signs, without aim—this very moment is the way.
The 20th Century brought us fascism and communism. Here are 20 lessons we can learn from this era gone by, brought to you by Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University.
To learn more, read the book.
I read a lot of good books this year. It was hard to decide which were the top three. But number one was easily the best I read all year.
Robin and I recently made a trip to Eastern Kentucky to look at some property. We stayed two nights at the lodge at The Breaks Interstate Park, in Virginia, just across the border from Kentucky. Here are a few snaps from the trip.
The name “Breaks” was derived from the break in Pine Mountain created by the Russell Fork of the Big Sandy River as it carved a 1000-foot deep gorge on its way to join the Ohio River.
The NO KINGS rally of October 18, 2025, was the largest single protest in American history. What did we demand? Freedom and Liberty.
Here are my pictures from that day in Louisville, Kentucky.
Ghost Dog 