This is the fifty-eighth chapter in Other People’s Thoughts, a China Heritage series inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.
Pierre remarked that the resulting modest volume of quotations was ‘idiosyncratically compiled for the amusement of idle readers’ (see Simon Leys, Other People’s Thoughts, 2007). Our aim is similar: to amuse our readers (idle or otherwise); as is our modus operandi: to build up an idiosyncratic compilation, one that reflects the interests of The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology and its coterie.
In collecting this material, and by adding to it over time, we accord also with a Chinese literary practice in which quotations — sometimes called yǔlù 語錄, literally ‘recorded sayings’ — have a particular history, and a powerful resonance.
The most famous collection of recorded sayings is The Analects 論語, compiled by disciples of Confucius. Then there is the timeless 5000-words of Laozi’s The Tao and the Power 道德經, as well as the Chan/Zen 禪宗 tradition of what in English are known by the Japanese term kōan 公案, dating from the Tang dynasty. Modern imitations range from the political bon mots of Mao Zedong to excerpts from the prolix prose of Xi Jinping’s tireless speech writers, and published snippets from arm-chair philosophers and motivational speakers.
Other People’s Thoughts also finds inspiration in the ‘poetry talks’ 詩話, ‘casual jottings’ 筆記 and ‘marginalia’ 眉批 of China’s literary tradition.
My thanks to Roger Pulvers, early mentor and long-time friend, for allowing me to include his translation of ‘Creation’ by Anna Akhmatova.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
15 May 2025
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Other People’s Thoughts I-LVII:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, LVIII
Sailing through the Waters of History
God has called me by your election to succeed the Prince of the Apostles, and has entrusted this treasure to me so that, with his help, I may be its faithful administrator (cf. 1 Cor 4:2) for the sake of the entire mystical Body of the church. He has done so in order that she may be ever more fully a city set on a hill (cf. Rev 21:10), an ark of salvation sailing through the waters of history and a beacon that illumines the dark nights of this world. And this, not so much through the magnificence of her structures or the grandeur of her buildings – like the monuments among which we find ourselves – but rather through the holiness of her members. For we are the people whom God has chosen as his own, so that we may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called us out of darkness into his marvellous light
— Pope Leo XIV’s first homily, 9 May 2025
The last thing Leo wants for his papacy, I’m sure, is to see it sucked into the sleazy reality show that is Trump-era American politics, a black hole of shame and nihilism from which no dignity can escape. …
But even if the pope shows saintly patience by refusing to involve himself in American politics, sooner or later the president will insist on involving him. “I’d put even money that Trump picks a fight with him, because he can’t help himself,” Jonathan Last predicted. “To Trump, an American pope who is not openly on the side of MAGA is a provocation.”
Precisely right. Any influential American who’s not openly on the side of MAGA is a provocation to the president, but until now he’s always had options to neutralize the threat. If you make trouble for him he can revoke any federal privileges you might enjoy, shrink your customer base by blackballing your company from government work, or whip up his fans to threaten your life.
There’s not much he can do to silence a pope, though, and thatwill eat at him. The mere fact that he now has an immigrant-loving rival for the title of Most Influential Living American will irritate his tender ego and eventually trigger his impulse to try to dominate those who threaten him. He will pick a fight with the pope, as totally moronic as the idea of such a thing is, because that’s who he is. The church provoked him by offering a different model of moral leadership to Americans and tacitly inviting them to pledge their allegiance to it. They’re coming after Trump’s people. He’ll take it personally.
— Nick Catoggio, Pope and Change, The Dispatch, 9 May 2025
Weak Men and Hard Times
Modern right-wing populists … bemoan the state of the world, seizing on cultural flashpoints to point out that we live in extraordinarily hard times caused by the weakness of our leaders and our cultural elites. But in reality, they’ve got it backward. We’ve been living in the good times. And they are weak men leading us back into the hard times. …
Americans live in the most powerful and most prosperous country during the most prosperous age in human history, and weak men are furious because of their own inability to maintain the top status in this blessed nation. If good times create weak men, they are the weak men—unable to live with success, struggling purely for the sake of struggle. They don’t feel loved or appreciated enough by society, so they’re burning it down just to feel some warmth.
— Jeremiah Johnson, Weak Men Create Hard Times, The Dispatch, 7 May 2025
Venom
They say that seven of the world’s most deadly animals are Australian. They are wrong. There are eight. And the deadliest one of all, Rupert Murdoch, lives in America.
— online comment, 13 May 2025
OOOC
Oblivious to One’s Own Cuntiness
— Acronym of the Day, X, 14 April 2025
The Monocle
Before I left, Mr. Udé showed me a photo of himself, taken in the 1980s. In it, he wears a monocle. “People would ask if it was a prescription lens,” he said. “I would say, Yes, for aesthetic vision.”
— Rhonda Garelick, Iké Udé Is America’s Premier Dandy. Naturally, the Met Came Calling., The New York Times, 28 April 2025
Looking Up
There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancient friend.
— James Baldwin, No Name in the Street
Claims That He’s a Nazi ‘Outrageous’
It’s ridiculous to think Musk is a Nazi, he’s just an everyday, drug addicted futurist who uses Nazi fonts, does Nazi salutes, endorsed a party of neo-Nazi in Germany, said Germans should move on from guilt, let neo-Nazis back on Twitter, and endorses the neo-Nazi Great Replacement Theory.
— @maxberger.bsky.social, 6 May 2025
Enemy of the Open Society
The citizen exists and is being used for the benefit of the state; and the benefit of the state and its power serves as a justification for every act of violence. Any criticism is treated as sacrilege as well as treason. The leader is worshipped as a demi-god. He is almighty or very nearly so, and all power flows from his will. And this power flows to his henchmen, who have to prove their worth by flattery, submission, and by being more ruthless than even the demi-god himself in the persecution of the lukewarm, of the suspect, and of the scapegoats.
— Karl Popper, quoted in May Fourth 2025 in Erewhon & the Enemies of the Open Society
Tariffs
When you tax your own citizens to teach another country a lesson they won’t learn.
— former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted 11 days before Trump fired him, wrote on X:”Waltz lasted 9.2 Scaramuccis.”
皮夾克的未來
你問這是什麼時代，將迎來怎樣的未來……最新的消息：硅谷大佬，身家相當於三個李嘉誠的黃仁勳來到北京，面謁領袖，20多年都穿著皮衣甚至在加州大熱天也不換裝的黃仁勳，忽然改成了中式行政夾克，對，就是你熟悉的那種“廳局風”。
黃仁勳的畫風突變，跟首都機場候機樓撤下壁畫，沒什麼區別。你該知道，這是什麼時代，我們將面臨怎樣的未來……
— 李承鵬，我們的壁畫時代和皮夾克的未來，《文學城》，2025年4月22日
A Seventh-Rank Sesame-Sized Nobody
This is a great book if you want to know more about any of the following:
- The history of Confucianism
- The legacy of Marxism in modern China
- How long the average faculty meeting is at a university in Shandong
- How seating arrangements are decided at Chinese banquets
- Why you shouldn’t let your friends write your dust jacket reviews
If you’re hoping for a fun romp through a 5-year history of what it’s really like working at the top level of a Chinese university, with all its quirks, faults, and excitement, you might have to write that book yourself.
— Edi Obiakpani-Reid, On Daniel Bell’s The Dean of Shandong, Sinobabble, 25 March 2025
Education: The non-coercive rearranging of desire
When we gathered as a class in the wake of the A.I. assignment, hands flew up. One of the first came from Diego, a tall, curly-haired student—and, from what I’d made out in the course of the semester, socially lively on campus. “I guess I just felt more and more hopeless,” he said. “I cannot figure out what I am supposed to do with my life if these things can do anything I can do faster and with way more detail and knowledge.” He said he felt crushed.
Some heads nodded. But not all. Julia, a senior in the history department, jumped in. “Yeah, I know what you mean,” she began. “I had the same reaction—at first. But I kept thinking about what we read on Kant’s idea of the sublime, how it comes in two parts: first, you’re dwarfed by something vast and incomprehensible, and then you realize your mind can grasp that vastness. That your consciousness, your inner life, is infinite—and that makes you greater than what overwhelms you.”
She paused. “The A.I. is huge. A tsunami. But it’s not me. It can’t touch my me-ness. It doesn’t know what it is to be human, to be me.”
The room fell quiet. Her point hung in the air. …
Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will read them, and systems such as these will be able to generate them, endlessly, at the push of a button.
But factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities. The real project was always us: the work of understanding, and not the accumulation of facts. Not “knowledge,” in the sense of yet another sandwich of true statements about the world. That stuff is great—and where science and engineering are concerned it’s pretty much the whole point. But no amount of peer-reviewed scholarship, no data set, can resolve the central questions that confront every human being: How to live? What to do? How to face death?
The answers to those questions aren’t out there in the world, waiting to be discovered. They aren’t resolved by “knowledge production.” They are the work of being, not knowing—and knowing alone is utterly unequal to the task.
For the past seventy years or so, the university humanities have largely lost sight of this core truth. Seduced by the rising prestige of the sciences—on campus and in the culture—humanists reshaped their work to mimic scientific inquiry. We have produced abundant knowledge about texts and artifacts, but in doing so mostly abandoned the deeper questions of being which give such work its meaning.
Now everything must change. That kind of knowledge production has, in effect, been automated. As a result, the “scientistic” humanities—the production of fact-based knowledge about humanistic things—are rapidly being absorbed by the very sciences that created the A.I. systems now doing the work. We’ll go to them for the “answers.”
But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions—and to live with them. The machines can’t do that for us. Not now, not ever.
And so, at last, we can return—seriously, earnestly—to the reinvention of the humanities, and of humanistic education itself. We can return to what was always the heart of the matter—the lived experience of existence. Being itself.
All that surfaces anew, because we are left alone with that. It alone cannot be taken from us.
And it is exhilarating. Also, at times, terrifying. It is, in the truest sense, sublime.
— D. Graham Burnett, Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?, The New Yorker, 26 April 2025
Do Your Own Research
The most cursed phrase in politics over the last decade isn’t “make America great again,” which, while sleazy and destructive in its application, is at least noble in its aspiration. It’s “do your own research.”
Research is a skill. To do it conscientiously requires brain power, intellectual rigor, and ideally a bit of training. The process begins with a question and arrives at a considered answer by weighing the available evidence as dispassionately as possible.
The sort of “research” undertaken by the average American yahoo in 2025 is the opposite. It starts with a conclusion that the “researcher” passionately wishes to reach and backfills an argument for it by cherry-picking evidence that supports the conclusion while impugning evidence that doesn’t. …
See now why I find the thought of Trump being misinformed more frightening than him being a liar? A liar is in touch with reality even if he pretends otherwise, a good quality for the most powerful person in the world to have. But a person who’s badly misinformed, and is surrounded by cretins eager to keep him that way, is capable of anything.
Our country is essentially now governed by a right-wing blog’s comment section. No wonder the “sell America” trend in markets is in full swing.
In theory, all of this is self-correcting. For the moment we live in a democracy, a “market” of sorts for policy information. If the government’s policies are bad and harmful, the market will reflect that and the government will be voted out in due course. But in a democracy in which so many stakeholders increasingly “do their own research,” it’s anyone’s guess anymore how efficiently truthful information is being priced into a political party’s “stock.” Despite the fact that Donald Trump has created the most toxic information environment in presidential history, it turns out that Americans now trust him just as much as they do the national political press.
Whether our politics is still “structured by reality” is the question of the age. We’re all about to find out the hard way.
— Nick Catoggio, FWD: FWD: FWD: MS-13, The Dispatch, 30 April 2025
Freedom
A core element of freedom is the ability of each person to live up to his or her potential. A liberal education is essential for this to happen, because it helps students develop their skills and capabilities to the utmost, frees them from shibboleths, and enables them to think critically. But this kind of approach is threatening to authoritarianism, which wants to impose particular views on a nation’s citizens. …
Another core element of freedom — indeed something essential to its survival — is that power must be limited; there have to be checks and balances not just within government but within society. I have long warned that the concentration of wealth among a small percentage of the population would provide a fertile field for a demagogue, and that there was an ample supply of people who might play the part.
— Joseph Stieglitz, I Planned a Lecture About Freedom. Then Trump’s D.E.I. Police Intervened., The New York Times, 13 May 2025
Never Be Owned
Money is the cheapest thing. Liberty and freedom is the most expensive.
— Bill Cunningham
After Gaza
We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims. We are not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it. That false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defense. It exempts Jews from external judgment. It offers infinite license to fallible human beings.
— from Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After The Destruction of Gaza (2025)
Pardon JK
“We love Jackie. You know, she created a whole wizarding world, a wonderful place for overweight millennials to stake their entire identity well past the point of being cute. ‘I’m a Hufflepuff.’ No bitch, you work at Staples!”
— Stephen Miller presents an executive order to pardon J.K. Rowling, Saturday Night Live, 3 May 2025
American genizah
The American text is exhausted. I am going to keep my memories of America in a genizah in my mind, the ones I have written here but also: dawn over the Shenandoah seen from the flatbed of an F-150; Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Mondrian in the MoMA; a New Orleans band that must have played When the Saints Go Marching In 10,000 times playing it as if it were the first time; the smell of tacos al pastor in a Tulsa parking lot; low-limit craps in Vegas; a western oriole strutting in pine needles; the stump of the “Tree of Hope” in Harlem; the Siesta Key Oyster Bar, where the walls were covered with Iraqi money stapled there by returning soldiers; the sausages at the Wrigley Field ballpark in Chicago; the New York hustler who went down the A train selling his romance novels out of a box; that wave at the border I may have half-imagined.
— Stephen Marche, The America I loved is gone, The Guardian, 20 April 2025
Concerned
When Republicans use the word, we should imagine a thought bubble, which states the truth: “I’m concerned someone is going to ask that I do something about Trump’s dangerous, dictatorial moves but all I want to do is hide from scrutiny, be a big kahuna at the country club, do nothing for my constituents, and keep my job for life.”
— Jennifer Rubin, Words & Phrases We Can Do Without, 6 May 2025
RAGE to DOGE
Yarvin escaped the fringe blogosphere because he wrapped deeply anti-American, totalitarian ideas in the language of U.S. start-up culture,” Brooking said. “And his writing is popular with DOGE employees today because they prefer to tell themselves that they are running a start-up, not dismantling a country.”
— Emerson T. Brooking quoted in Curtis Yarvin helped inspire DOGE. Now he scorns it., The Washington Post, 8 May 2025
Curtis Yarvin
It’s unclear to me that he’s a reliable witness to his own views.
— Danielle Allen
尚友
孟子謂萬章曰：一鄉之善士，斯友一鄉之善士；一國之善士，斯友一國之善士；天下之善士，斯友天下之善士。以友天下之善士為未足，又尚論古之人。頌其詩，讀其書，不知其人，可乎？是以論其世也。是尚友也。
— 孟子萬章下
Adult baby diaper fetishist
On Democracies and Death Cults [by Douglas Murray] reached number 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list. It got the second spot on the New York Times’. Fourth on Amazon. A lot of people are buying and reading this thing. But who? And why? This is a genuine question. I truly can’t imagine the kind of creature that would want to read this thing. Who needs to be told that their own side is composed of faultless angels who have never done anything wrong in their lives, while their enemies are all bubbling in a black ooze out of the deepest chasms of Hell? How much love are you lacking in your personal life, that you need to be sucked off through the pages of a trade nonfiction hardback? …
HarperCollins might as well have published a book about how when it rains, that’s God crying. To see a 46-year-old man speaking in this childish register produces a genuine shudder. The horror of the man-child, the pervert or imbecile who never managed to grow up. The political equivalent of an adult baby diaper fetishist.
— Sam Kriss, Douglas Murray, gruesome toady, 11 May 2025
Simply Standing Still
[Jeffrey] Goldberg credited the Atlantic’s owner, billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, for standing strong behind the magazine when other media owners are creepy-crawling to Trump. “The north star is character,” he said. “As some of these eruptions are taking place at the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, ABC, CBS, Laurene said, ‘I’ve never gotten so much credit for simply standing still.’ But that’s the thing, standing still in the storm is an action.” “To go to the theme of this conference,” Goldberg concluded, “the only way to operate in this environment is to refuse to be bullied and refuse to be scared…our values are our values, they don’t change with the shifting winds.”
— Tina Brown, Fresh Hell, 13 May 2025
汶川大地震17週年
高呼“收復釣魚島、攻打黃岩島”這種比愛國主義胸大肌行為，很難證明真偽，不如讓我們務實地談談愛國主義：愛國主義，是給孩子修校舍時少收一分回扣，多添幾根鋼筋；是政府少修點豪華辦公樓，給災民多建些過冬房屋；是官員們少喝些茅台，給學生們多生產些放心奶；是報紙、電視少宣傳點感動中國的虛假英雄，多公佈些溘然逝去的平民名字；是每個人能在這片土地上自由遷徙，而不是擁有多麼廣袤的國土。愛國主義不是愛冰冷的國家機器，而是愛溫暖如冬陽的共同價值觀，讓每個人都擁有生活尊嚴，保護渺小的自己，記得在每一個紀念日，長歌當哭，讓每一朵平凡的生命綻開如蓮花……
Pretty Little Things
You are going to do things differently. You are going to write without contractions, which are unworthy of a serious writer and, you aver, symptomatic of the degeneration of Art and Beauty into lifeless demotic goo. In every thoughtlessly truncated word lies the same decrepitude by which as grand an appellation as ‘The Men’s Room’ no longer signifies some solemn book-lined chamber
within which men of quality may discuss the great issues of their day, but has come to denote a mere hole for pissing in. It is incumbent upon you to arrest this aforesaid degeneracy by means of your impeccable literary vitalism, to wit, a story about the kind of person you don’t like, who masturbates to sissy porn and then kills himself. A mere few strokes of your pen, and your muscular masculine prose—real writing, sufficient to express the contours of real existence, laced with real memes—will instantaneously obliterate the sterile neologisms and fussy indecipherable ingroup-speak of the skinnyfat zogslop longhouse NPC bugman globohomo egregore. Pebblecuck Venetian-blindscel topazpilling, Khazarian podlicker planetary splungoven. Douftil grangleman, spoddleball vac heenie-feenie mugrancis brenge. Asshat. Cockwomble.
— Sam Kriss, Guide to Writing, Numb at the Lodge, 25 May 2025
Hopefulness, an exchange
Following the last few years I’m feeling empty and more cynical than ever. I’m losing faith in other people, and I’m scared to pass these feelings to my little son. Do you still believe in Us (human beings)?
— Valerio, Stockholm (and Rome)
Dear Valerio,
You are right to be worried about your growing feelings of cynicism and you need to take action to protect yourself and those around you, especially your child. Cynicism is not a neutral position — and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils.
I know this because much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent. The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line. I lacked the knowledge, the foresight, the self-awareness. I just didn’t know. It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people. It took a devastation to reveal the precariousness of the world, of its very soul, to understand that it was crying out for help. It took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope.
Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, Valerio, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.
Love, Nick (Cave)