Havel is one of the heroes of The White Pill so I was excited to read this, since he was a writer. It is almost offensively bad and frankly disrespectful to the reader. The book alternates between the transcript of an interview between Havel and a journalist and Havel's diary--the entirety of which is totally banal and isnt even in chronological order. We hear him stressing about having to write a speech but not about why or what its contents are--or whether it ended up working out. Worse, a few one-paragraph entries are repeated verbatim throughout, though to what point I have no idea. Absolutely awful book.
“Violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim.”
“The scapegoat is the innocent victim who is collectively put to death and then divinized.”
- Rene Girard
It's really fascinating to interpret current events through the Girardian filter. For all its ills, social media completely destroys the ability of any one side to control the narrative which prevents the scapegoat mechanism from getting completed and thus temporary unity is not restored.
When my husband told me that ICE killed someone in Minnesota, I knew the facts were only loosely important and that most people would reliably fall quickly into their respective teams (Scott Alexander referred to this as the scissor, Scott Adams two movies one screen). The left tried to divinize the female victim, much like George Floyd, but it doesn't seem to be sticking very well and I think a big part of this is because the video evidence shows reality too well - it's messy and complicated and nuanced, because it's real life.
Jonathan ...
