Welcome to Douglas Wilson's blog and May blog, presented by Ken Impress.

The bottom of the empathy hole, November 20th, 2023, preamble.

If you are here for the really inflammatory stuff, that doesn't really come in until the penultimate

section.

But if you want to understand the reason for the

inflammatory stuff I'm afraid you will have to work through the whole article.

I'm sorry but we were not put into this world for pleasure alone.

Introduction so an epistemic penny dropped for me the other day.

Everyone sees that America is divided between two rival factions and we are well into what has been called a cold civil war.

So much is obvious. There are the defined factions on either end of the division, and in the middle

there's a large and co-a-a-a-a-de-group that just wishes it would all go away, but which you'll still

have to make up its mind at some point.

What is driving all this?

The thing that occurred to me concerned the energy behind the two rival factions.

Why are they a dagger's drawn of necessity?

The answer is that the two rival factions are shaped and

contained by two rival definitions. I've said for years that our cultural battles are

over editorial control of the dictionary, but this latest thought means that it all comes down to just

one word. What is the definition of insanity? What does madness mean? In order to set this up, I'm going to be talking about our emotions, our

affections, our feelings. These two groups define insanity in very different ways,

but both in terms of our relationship to these emotive realities.

One group defines insanity as any kind of restriction of or discipline for these feelings.

...