Death. It is the mother of all our fears. Fear reflects our vulnerability and, ultimately, our mortality. Pain, however horrible, is ultimately bearable; death is not! And yet, no one has ever experienced death and no one ever will (the definition of death is “the absence of all experience”). What we think we know about death comes entirely from external observations of other organisms (including loved ones).

Death. It is the mother of all our fears. Fear reflects our vulnerability and, ultimately, our mortality. Pain, however horrible, is ultimately bearable; death is not! And yet, no one has ever experienced death and no one ever will (the definition of death is “the absence of all experience”). What we think we know about death comes entirely from external observations of other organisms (including loved ones).

As a teenager, I became aware of a book by Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West, written c. 1920. Like any intellectually inclined adolescent of the ‘60s, I was drawn to the title. But throughout high school and college I was warned off of Spengler by teachers, mentors, etc.: “He’s a racist, he’s a Nazi, etc.” All false claims. In fact, his books were banned by the Nazis.

We have been trained to think of mythology as fictional, even foolish. And yet all Truth (whatever that is, Pontius Pilate) occurs within the framework of some mythology. Myth is the ultimate and only TOE (Theory of Everything). Science and math, for example, however important, are limited by the discoveries of Heisenberg and Gödel. Religion requires faith and so must be limited by the skepticism that unavoidably lies beneath that faith.

“Nothing is noble which it is noble to despise. Wealth, honors…absolute power…these no sensible man would count as blessings since…it is nobler to despise (them) than to admire (them).” (Longinus, 3rd century A.D.)

For better or worse, we don’t talk a lot about ‘nobility’ today, but the virtue of nobility is one of those virtues that is strongly correlated with the concept of the Good. If you can imagine yourself condemning a particular ‘accident’ (above) as ignoble, then you are not yet dealing with true nobility.

Like the Good…or Being itself…true nobility is among those qualities that have no antonym.

For the first time since the 1980’s, we seem to be dealing with monthly, year over year, inflation rates north of 5%. More alarmingly, the cognoscenti are busily assuring us that this uptick is “only temporary”, the result of supply chain disruptions that will ‘soon’ be fixed.

Caveat: historically (1930 Germany, 1975 US), nothing triggers hyper-inflation so certainly as denial of the simple inflation that folks are experiencing everyday at the gas pump or in the supermarket. Just ask Paul von Hindenburg…or Gerald Ford.

Happily, it has been 40 years since hyper-inflation dominated the US economy; less happily, once hyper-inflation gets into the system it is extremely difficult to get out. It took the Reagan Revolution to make it happen here.