For fear of losing his job, the schoolteacher teaches things he does not believe; fearing for his future, the pupil repeats them after him…. [I]t is fear that carries [people] through sundry humiliating acts of self-criticism and penitence and the dishonest filling out of a mass of degrading questionnaires; fear that someone might inform against them prevents them from giving public, and often even private, expression of their true opinions…. Fear of being prevented from continuing their work leads many scientists and artists to give allegiance to ideas they do not in fact accept, to write things they do not agree with or know to be false, to join official organizations or to take part in work of whose value they have the lowest opinion, or to distort and mutilate their own works.1

He clarifies that fear, here, does not mean a temporary and specific emotion with observable physiological signs but the constant awareness of an all-pervasive danger. People become accustomed and adjust to that sense of danger, modifying their behaviors to protect themselves.

Havel then wonders—the whole letter is a series of innocently posed questions, and honest answers, without the slightest trace of disingenuousness—what it is, exactly, that people are worried about, since by 1975 in Czechoslovakia torture, deportation, show trials, and so on are a thing of the past. He then answers himself with the observation that people’s fears will scale up to whatever threats exist in their own lives, whatever the threat’s actual size:

Notoriously, it is not the absolute value of a threat which counts, so much as its relative value. It is not so much what a man objectively loses, as the subjective importance it has for him on the plane on which he lives, with its own scale of values. Thus, if a man today is afraid, say, of losing the chance of working in his own field, this may be a fear equally strong, and productive of the same reactions, as if—in another historical context—he had been threatened with the confiscation of his property. Indeed, the technique of existential pressure is, in a sense, more universal. For there is no one in our country who is not, in a broad sense, existentially vulnerable. Everyone has something to lose and so everyone has reason to be afraid.2

It is true that fear often grows out of proportion to the magnitude of a threat. When friends suggest that the present is a worse time than any other, I tell them that on the scale of centuries it is not. Women today may have fewer rights than when I was born, but all those who wish to burn me at an actual stake will have to do so extrajudicially, and I am grateful for that. That said, Havel’s suggestion that certain punishments were either rare or obsolete was too optimistic; three years later, in 1978, he would publish “The Power of the Powerless” and go to prison for four years for it.

Betraying one’s principles from fear is understandable, although sometimes the fear is so disproportionate to reality that it becomes ridiculous. Fear is also sometimes deliberately induced in oneself to justify one’s desire to do harm or claim exaggerated victimhood, or in others to control and manipulate them. Even when exaggerated, however, the fear of losing one’s possessions and opportunities was not sufficient to explain all the ugly and hypocritical behavior that Havel saw. There were other, baser reasons:

If it is fear which lies behind people’s defensive attempts to preserve what they have, it becomes increasingly apparent that the chief impulses for their aggressive efforts to win what they do not yet possess are selfishness and careerism.

Seldom in recent times, it seems, has a social system offered scope so openly and so brazenly to people willing to support anything at any time, so long as it brings them some advantage; to unprincipled and spineless men, prepared to do anything in their craving for power and personal gain; to born lackeys, ready for any humiliation and willing at all times to sacrifice their neighbours’ and their own honour for a chance to ingratiate themselves with those in power.3

Later Havel will ask what a system like this, which rewards the debasement and degradation of oneself and others, will do to human beings, and what kind of people will be honored and magnified by such a system. I can answer from personal observation that it changes many people for the worse: many previously decent people will respond to such an environment by adjusting whatever they need to adjust about themselves in order to continue to make a good living and enjoy their lives. If one of the things that must be jettisoned is one’s conscience, honesty, or integrity, over the side it goes. Sacrificing a friend or colleague to the mob is no obstacle at all. In several cases I know for what price I was sold.

You do not, however, get good work or real artists from such a system. Sooner or later they will be excluded from the system, which does not and cannot permit the existence of a different and more lasting set of values than self-aggrandizement and the acquisition of status and power. Any set of values that is conducive to genuine art exists in direct opposition to the fear, selfishness, and careerism that Havel describes, and ultimately will defeat them, death itself notwithstanding, because the life and art and work that result from each set of values speak for themselves. That it why when fear, selfishness, and careerism are ascendant, those alternative values cannot be permitted to exist. At such a time, a real artist or scientist—or anyone, really, who follows a more permanent and valuable compass than fear and greed—must, sooner or later, be compromised or suppressed.

It is fair to say that, in a way, we are all being publicly bribed.... If, as a creative artist, you take part in such and such official functions, you will be rewarded with such and such genuine creative opportunities. Think what you like in private, as long as you agree in public, refrain from making difficulties, suppress your interest in truth and silence your conscience—and the doors will be wide open to you.4

The last sentence happens to be the exact invitation that another author, a professor at the University of Chicago, extended to me a little less than two years ago. If I were willing to lie, she said, if I were willing to blind and deafen myself to all that I was noticing, I would not be suppressed, punished, defamed, and ostracized. I would be rewarded with power and opportunity—as she and other writers are still rewarded—and the doors of literature would not be shut upon me. Would I not do so?

I would not.

To this day, I do not know if the vast distance between our positions results from our having read different books, or having thought about them differently, or whether the difference lies somewhere deeper. I know that I have been influenced by Arendt and Woolf and Havel and Milosz—“In rebelling, I believe I protect the fruits of tomorrow better than my friend who keeps silent. I assume the risk and I pay”5—not to mention Matthew 4:8-9. (My response was politer than 4:10.) It may also be the case that I was simply constructed differently, which is something for which I can receive no credit.

“Now I am hopeless—a just punishment,” Milosz wrote in 1953, after making the same choice. In his last week in prison and directly afterwards, Havel almost went mad.6 But their hopelessness and madness have become the grounds for my own hope. Their lives, after all, did not end there.

Nation, world and state—events since After math (3)

Pardon the length: a whole year has passed.

May 29, 2025: A federal court in Texas vacates the 2024 EEOC guidelines on harassment with respect to pronouns and the right to enter bathrooms and locker rooms of the opposite sex in the workplace. State laws remain in force.

June 18: As previously mentioned, the Supreme Court rules 6-3 in U.S. v. Skrmetti that Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors seeking a sex change does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This decision broke an information dam at multiple left-of-center newspapers, which finally began to report on the poor evidence for these treatments. Previously, that kind of information was restricted to the Opinion section.

June 27: The Supreme Court rules 6-3 in Mahmoud vs. Taylor in favor of a group of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, and Orthodox Orthodox parents in a public school district in Maryland who were not permitted to excuse their children from the teaching of five storybooks mandatory for teachers from kindergarten through fifth grade. Three contested books included same-sex romance or marriage. Two informed readers that girls could become boys and vice versa.

Sep 19: World Athletics says that 135 finalists in elite women’s sport competitions from 2000 onward have gone through male puberty. Sex testing via cheek swabs was introduced for the World Athletics championships in Tokyo.

Nov 17: The HHS report on pediatric gender medicine is released and generally ignored due to being 410 pages long and commissioned by the Trump administration.

Dec 8: A UK employment tribunal rules that NHS nurse Sandie Peggie was in fact harassed by the male doctor who repeatedly entered the female nurses’ changing room. For objecting to his presence, Peggie was suspended by the NHS in January 2024. Her other claims were dismissed with invented citations from other court cases. She filed an appeal in January. Dr. Upton, the male doctor, has fled to Australia.

Jan 15, 2026: The FTC denies WPATH’s petition to drop their investigation into how WPATH creates guidelines like SOC-8, which as the NYT reported last year was influenced by politicians more than medical evidence. Notably, the FTC’s demands for documents include the two 2020 Johns Hopkins systematic reviews commissioned by WPATH then suppressed after their results proved inconvenient. The existence of those reviews became public during discovery in Boe v. Marshall.

Jan 16: The “Darlington eight,” eight of twenty-six nurses at Darlington NHS who signed a letter objecting to the hospital inviting a male employee into their changing rooms, for which they were punished, prevail at their employment tribunal. The judge states that the hospital’s behavior had the effect of “violating the dignity of the claimants and creating a hostile, intimidating, humiliating and degrading environment for them.”

Jan 30: In the first medical malpractice lawsuit to make it to jury trial in the U.S., Fox Varian, a detransitioner who had her breasts removed at the age of 16, was awarded $2 million in damages by a New York jury. WPATH president-elect Loren Schechter, in an abrupt about-face for WPATH, testified against Varian’s doctors and in favor of Varian.

Feb 3: The American Society of Plastic Surgeons publishes a public statement opposing sex-change surgeries for minors in light of the increased evidence for harms and low quality of evidence for benefits, citing the HHS and Cass reports. The American Medical Association agrees with them, contradicting their own past statements. Some AMA members deny the AMA statement, resulting in a NYT fact check.

Feb 5: Women’s boxing gold medalist Imane Khelif confirms to a L’Equipe reporter that he has the SRY gene, which is located on the Y chromosome.

Feb 18: The BC Human Rights Commissioner orders Barry Neufeld to pay $750,000 for not believing in gender ideology and being rude about it. Given that Rob Hoogland was only fined $30,000 and sentenced to six months in prison for describing his daughter as his daughter in 2021, inflation in Canada appears to have gotten out of hand.7

Mar 12: Olympus Spa v. Armstrong is denied an en banc hearing by the Ninth Circuit Court. At least six judges dissent from the denial. They include Judge Kenneth Lee, who is Korean and was the sole voice of sanity and dissent in the original hearing, where the two white judges described the Korean spa’s women-only policy as equivalent to a whites-only policy.8 Judge VanDyke is coarse and crude in his highly readable dissent and gets reprimanded. The spa has until July 10 to file a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court.

Mar 26: The Department of Justice informs California that it is launching an investigation into SB 132, the 2020 bill championed by Scott Weiner that allowed any male inmate in California to request transfer to a women’s prison, and the effects of that bill on female inmates, which included multiple sexual assaults and female inmates being required to describe their rapes in court using female pronouns for their male attackers.

Also on Mar 26: Under new president Kirsty Coventry, the IOC re-introduces cheek swabs for the SRY gene on the Y chromosome. This had been the procedure from 1968 to 1999, when the IOC stopped testing for sex despite 82% of the Olympic female athletes who responded to a 1996 survey expressing their support for it. While the capitalization is odd, it’s a relief to read statements based in empirical reality, in contrast to the previous policy based on the eight data points of Joanna Harper and his friends (seven after he tossed one out for being inconvenient), which compared their run times in their twenties to their run times in their forties and claimed the difference was due to taking estrogen. See Exercise 1.1. From the IOC policy document:

There is a 10-12 per cent Male performance advantage in most running and swimming events. There is a 20+ per cent Male performance advantage in most throwing and jumping events. The Male performance advantage can be greater than 100 per cent in events that involve explosive power, e.g. in collision, lifting and punching sports.9

Mar 31: The Supreme Court rules 8-1 in Chiles v. Salazar that Colorado’s law requiring therapists to exclusively affirm patients’ assertions of gender identity violates the First Amendment. Washington State has a similar law, which fines the therapist $5,000 and rescinds his or her license to practice for questioning a patient’s asserted identity (Tingley v. Ferguson). See Exercise 1.2 for the linguistic sleight-of-hand that has fooled pretty much everyone I know.

Apr 13: NHS nurse Jennifer Melle, suspended and branded a threat to the public after the convicted pedophile she was treating heard her calling him “him” while discussing the placement of a catheter, wins a confidential settlement against her employer.

Apr 14: Australia’s Federal Court permits Lesbian Action Group to appeal the 2023 decision, upheld in 2025, that their group cannot hold lesbian-only events that exclude men.

Apr 17: The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacates the district court’s injunction that prevented the return of male inmates currently housed in federal women’s prisons to federal men’s prisons. The district court has been given the opportunity to revise its case.

Apr 27: FAIR, in partnership with AFI, files suit against the Washington Department of Corrections on behalf of female inmates in the Women’s Correctional Center of Washington. The filing describes multiple attacks by male inmates, among them Nathan Goninan and Christopher Williams, who previously assaulted Mozzy Clark, upon female inmates, including an elderly woman in a wheelchair. Paragraphs 44-46 provide the answers to Exercise 2.2.

Apr 27: Róisín Murphy gives an eloquent speech at the launch of Freedom in the Arts’ new report, “The New Boycott Crisis.” In support of that report, FITA’s website now includes checklists and case studies for artists, agents, publishers, and arts organizations under pressure to suppress individual artists for their ethnicity or refusal to conform.

Apr 29: Detransitioner Camille Kiefel, who had a double mastectomy as an adult, reaches a confidential settlement with a social worker and counselor and their employers instead of going to jury trial. 27 other malpractice lawsuits from detransitioners are pending.

May 5: Singapore’s Ministry of Health issues new guidelines advising against minors receiving cross-sex hormones or sex-change surgery.

May 6: The British Medical Association, which was alone among UK medical associations in opposing the Cass Review in 2024, before revising its position to one of neutrality after 1,500 members signed a letter of protest, concludes its independent investigation into the Cass Review by fully vindicating Dr. Cass and her work. See Exercise 3.1.

News

• In February I did an interview with SEEN in Publishing, which was released in March.

• Paying subscribers have received an essay on owls, potatoes, and swans, an essay on the mixture of good and evil in every human being, and an essay on the increasing popularity of sentimentality without substance.

• There is one signed copy of Jewel Box in the science fiction section at B&N Spokane Valley.

For Merton, the first task of the intellectual is alertness to those who demand power over others, no matter their affiliation or what they call themselves:

When I speak of “them,”2 you will understand that I mean those special ones who seek power over “all the others,” and who use us as instruments to gain power over the others….

We [intellectuals] must identify them wherever “they” may appear, even though they may rise up in the midst of ourselves, or among “the others.” We must be able to recognize “them” by what they are and not rest satisfied with what is said about them… It is already rare for an intellectual to retain his sense of judgment when “they” change their masks and reshuffle their labels and put on different badges. Yet “they” are always “they.” It is to their obvious interest to bribe us to give them a new name, a false identity, especially since, in doing so, we convince ourselves that we have made a brilliant discovery. We must not let our vanity provide “them” with false passports.

Identifying those who seek power over everyone else does not change the fact that they usually obtain the power they seek. The intellectual then faces the false choice of compromising herself for the prizes, protection, or paid positions that power can offer, or chasing some easy solution that is not really different from the easy solutions offered by power. The only real response, says Merton, is to trust in life and God and speak as the child in Andersen’s fairy tale did:

Have you and I forgotten that our vocation, as innocent bystanders—and the very condition of our terrible innocence—is to do what the child did, and keep on saying the king is naked, at the cost of being condemned criminals? Remember, the child in the tale was the only innocent one: and because of his innocence, the fault of the others was kept from being criminal, and was nothing worse than foolishness. If the child had not been there, they would all have been madmen, or criminals. It was the child’s cry that saved them.

It’s a pleasant sentiment, and I agree with his first point, but Merton’s reasoning is backwards. As soon as people applauded and praised the emperor’s nonexistent clothes, either to protect themselves or to advance their own interests, they became fools and “prostitutes,” to use another term Merton suggests, willing to lie and affirm delusions for personal profit and safety. But they were able to avoid acknowledging this fact about themselves as long as everyone else also lied in the same way.

“I am justified and innocent because no one could have done otherwise,” they say to themselves. “Who could resist those pressures? Everyone else has done the same.”

When the child describes reality, however, proving that it has been possible to choose differently all along, such people become conscious of who they really are and what they have chosen to do. Or as Havel wrote in “The Power of the Powerlesss”:

By breaking the rules of the game, he has… exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system…. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie…. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened…. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth.3

It is not the child’s cry that saves the crowd, except in the imaginary world of Andersen’s story, where innocence is its own defense and people are decent enough to feel ashamed of themselves. It is the child’s cry that causes the crowd to see itself for a moment as it is, as a crowd of fools and prostitutes, a self-condemning awareness that is too painful for any but the mature to accept. And what cannot be accepted about the self is often projected outward onto others, as in the classic example of the unfaithful man who accuses his wife of infidelity. To avoid becoming conscious of the dissonance between his actions and his self-image, he will project his own behavior onto his wife and accuse, punish, and control her as a substitute and scapegoat for himself.

Similarly, outside of the world of the fairy tale, those who have made themselves fools and prostitutes will project that unbearable knowledge of themselves outwards onto the child and condemn the child as a fool and prostitute, so that they can continue to believe themselves innocent and good.4 In doing so, they genuinely become “madmen” and “criminals.” To the extent that they catch glimpses of their further descent into depravity, they will then condemn the child as a madman and criminal, again to preserve their tenuous belief in their own innocence.

Doris Lessing, after describing widespread and virulent racial prejudice among white people in Rhodesia, remarks on the fate of those who dissented:

It was not permissible for any member of this white minority to disagree with them. Anybody who did faced immediate ostracism... While the white régime lasted—ninety years, which is nothing in historical terms—a dissident was a heretic and traitor. Also, the rules of this particular game demanded that it was not enough to say: “So and so disagrees with us, who are the possessors of evident truth.” It had to also be said: “So and so is evil, corrupt, sexually depraved,” and so on.5

Lessing gives a second example of this pattern of behavior during the 1984-85 U.K. miner’s strike, when a few of the striking miners ran out of money and returned to work. Neighbors, including friends, smashed their windows, broke into their homes, and beat them. The same pattern recurs throughout history. Therefore, Lessing writes, a reasonable estimate of the world is that “we can stand in a room full of dear friends, knowing that nine-tenths of them, if the pack demands it, will become our enemies—will, as it were, throw stones through our windows.”6

For Lessing, this view of life is “bleak,” though realistic and necessary to be effective in one’s life and work. But there was no social media when she wrote this, no network of group surveillance to force the individual to conform, and so I think her view is not bleak enough for the situation today. From my experience, a more accurate estimate would be nineteen of twenty of your friends turning to rend your flesh with their teeth when you disagree with enforced orthodoxy, however polite and factually correct your disagreement, though that number might be smaller if you are a man. God bless that twentieth friend, however, of whom Lessing writes:

But there is always the minority who do not, and it seems to me that our future, the future of everybody, depends on this minority. And that we should be thinking of ways to educate our children to strengthen this minority and not, as we mostly do now, to revere the pack.

This remains a fairly optimistic view compared to Arendt’s. Lessing later repeats her belief in the promise and potency of the “lonesome individual,” the “very few,” upon whom “the health, the vitality of all our institutions, not only literature” depends.7 In stark contrast, Arendt’s term for the same group is “impotent”:

If you examine the few, the very few, who in the moral collapse of Nazi Germany remained completely intact and free of all guilt…. they did not feel an obligation but acted according to something which was self-evident to them even though it was no longer self-evident to those around them. Hence their conscience, if that is what it was, had no obligatory character, it said, “This I can’t do,” rather than, “This I ought not to do”….

Politically speaking—that is, from the viewpoint of the community or of the world we live in—it is irresponsible; its standard is the self and not the world, neither its improvement nor change. These people are neither heroes nor saints, and if they become martyrs, which of course may happen, it happens against their will. In the world, moreover, where power counts, they are impotent.8

Restated in Merton’s terms, in a time when power and honors and the system itself have become corrupt, the “very few” who maintain their integrity are those who consciously renounce power over others and participation in the system, though that leaves them with nothing: no influence, often no income, and few friends.

Joseph Weizenbaum, who like Arendt lived in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich, after the war observed heightened tension among university professors whenever the name of any German academic who succeeded during that period came up. “There is a recognition… that the conduct not only of the colleague, but of all German academicians of the time, is in question,” he writes. That palpable tension arises because “ethics, at bottom, deals with nothing so much as renunciation.”9 After the madness passes, Arendt says, participants should be asked not Why did you obey? but Why did you support?10 Negatively stated, the question that weighs on those German academics is: Why did you not renounce?

As if the painfulness and powerlessness of that course of action were not sufficient discouragement, Arendt adds as well the indissoluble element of loneliness:

[T]he man who has fallen in love with doing good has embarked upon the most lonely career there can be for man, except if he happens to believe in God, to have God for company and testimony. So strong is this element of real loneliness in every positive attempt at doing good and not being content with shunning evil, that even Kant, who otherwise was so careful to eliminate God and all religious precepts from his moral philosophy, appeals to God as bearing witness to the otherwise unexplorable and undetectable existence of good will.11

To this one can bravely respond, with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “And since / We needs must hunger… let us bear our weights, / Preferring dreary hearths to desert souls.”12

But false conviviality is hardly free of loneliness. If I tell you, for example, the story I was told some time ago about a California institute’s private, invitation-only retreat for science fiction and fantasy writers, you may get a sense of what I mean. At this retreat, one of the attendees announced to the others, in case they had not already heard the gossip, that I had “gone off the deep end” and become “hateful,” a slur applied to me because I know that human beings cannot change sex and that imprisoning women with convicted male rapists is an atrocity.

No one there spoke a word in my defense. But I laughed when the people in that room were named to me,13 because I knew them personally, and knew that every single one of them either privately agreed with me or had in their possession evidence that my accuser was lying. Had anyone been courageous enough to say that I was a human being and permitted to hold my own opinions, he would probably have found support from at least one other person in that room. He certainly would have increased in self-respect and been able to look everyone else in the eye after that.

But they all sat in fear and discomfort, conscious of being watched and suspected by the others, aware that at any moment they too could be denounced by those around them as a “heretic and traitor,” as being “evil, corrupt, sexually depraved,” to use Lessing’s words, should they speak aloud their knowledge of the truth: that the child is correct, the emperor is naked, and the crowd is a ship of fools. They did not speak because they knew every other person in the room would personally profit from their destruction, even if they secretly agreed.14 With the possible exception of my accuser, nobody in that room trusted any other person enough to be honest; each one believed the others would sell him or her out.

What could be more desolate than that?

News

• I’m giving two talks at the Illuminate Art + Faith Conference at Southern Adventist University in Chattanooga, TN, March 23-24, 2026.

• Quillette has just published “A History of Morality Clauses,” which goes a bit more in depth on the topic than Break, Blow, Burn, & Make.

• After finally finding and reading the ruling in Dreiser v. Lane Co. as part of research into the above, I found an additional mistake in my original account. The three errors in the first edition of Break, Blow, Burn, & Make that I know of are now cataloged by page number on my website: Errata.

• In the past three months, paying subscribers have received an essay on the premise of Pascal’s wager and Bayesian probability, a meditation on quinces, and a three-part commentary on AI.

• When I was wondering if anything I’d written here mattered—whether I am in fact flinging paper airplanes into the void— announced a new series of essays inspired by “The butterfly catcher.” His newest book, Art Is, received the Christianity Today Book Award. It is a quiet prayer and meditation, like a stone placed in running water.

• I attended the premiere of the documentary Mouth of the Wolf, released Monday of this week, and found much of it beautiful, particularly the ending. It’s available on Hulu.

Usually, repression is enforced by powerful members of the group threatening punishment, the most common being some form of ostracization or excommunication. This may take the form of no longer including an individual’s thoughts or writing in relevant discussions, especially publication, or excluding individuals from important meetings and conferences. And in some cases it may take the form of a consistent, behind-the-scenes effort to cast doubt verbally on their credibility.

—bell hooks, “Censorship from Left and Right”1

And what I said, is unrepented of,
As truth is always.

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

It has now been a year—two years, to be accurate, although those who began their campaign against me in 2023 were fewer and more subtle—that I have been pilloried for presenting evidence for both sides of an argument and speaking plainly and truthfully what far more powerful men knew but were too terrified to say. I was not the first person to do so, and knew what the penalty would be. Most of what I was punished for saying was corroborated by the New York Times in June of this year, which is not the first time I’ve noticed a three-year delay in the NYT’s publication of stories inconvenient to its activist contingent.

What is most interesting to me about the past twelve months is not the predictable abandonment by friends and colleagues, not the tissue-paper lies told about me that you could put your finger through, but the glittering traces left like moldavite in the impact crater. For one thing, despite some doubtful moments, my eyesight remains intact.2 For another, in this retelling of King Lear, although Lear hasn’t come to his senses yet, Cordelia is still alive.3 Best of all, , who was facing twenty-five years in prison in Brazil for describing a male politician as male, was granted asylum in August in an unnamed European country on the grounds of political persecution. She is the first feminist to be protected in this way and has created a path for the rest.4

I have come to realize that there exists a pattern far larger than the individual, operating on a scale of centuries, nearly mechanical in its motions. It might arise as a natural, manipulable phenomenon of human nature, as Le Bon suggested; it might arise from the eternal confrontation between good and evil, as Buber thought. What matters is that it does arise, and that it repeats every couple of generations.

In spite of the differences in time, place, and social milieu, the pattern remains the same from decade to decade, century to century. Joan’s trial is Galileo’s trial; Galileo’s trial is Sophie Scholl’s. Hildegard von Bingen’s being placed under interdict is Galileo’s being “vehemently suspected of heresy.” There is not so much of a difference between Sophie Scholl and Jeremiah, fundamentally speaking, as the several millennia between them and the differences in their circumstances might suggest. Václav Havel, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Czesław Miłosz, Alexei Navalny, and Boris Pasternak are very different people with very different lives, and yet their positions and their functions in the pattern are essentially identical. They play a single role, the same role, each in his society at his time. Quietly and clearly, by pamphlet or book or banner, knowing what it will cost them, each one says to those in power: “I beg to differ.”

Here is Zamyatin’s June 1931 appeal to Stalin:

I know that I have a highly inconvenient habit of speaking what I consider to be the truth rather than saying what may be expedient at the moment. Specifically, I have never concealed my attitude toward literary servility, fawning, and chameleon changes of color: I have felt—and I still feel—that this is equally degrading both to the writer and to the Revolution. I raised this problem in one of my articles5…in a form that many people found to be sharp and offensive, and this served as a signal at the time for the launching of a newspaper and magazine campaign against me….

Everything possible was done to close to me all avenues for further work. I became an object of fear to my former friends, publishing houses and theaters. My books were banned from the libraries. My play The Flea, presented with invariable success by the Second Studio of the Moscow Art Theater for four seasons, was withdrawn from the repertory. The publication of my collected works by the Federatsiya Publishing House was halted. Every publishing house which attempted to issue my works was immediately placed under fire…. Last spring, the Leningrad branch of the RAPP succeeded in forcing me off the board and putting an end to this work. The Literary Gazette triumphantly announced this accomplishment, adding quite unequivocally: “The publishing house must be preserved, but not for the Zamyatins.” The last door to the reader was closed to Zamyatin.

….I beg to be permitted to go abroad with my wife temporarily, or at least one year, with the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men.6

Here is Thomas Merton on Boris Pasternak’s suppression after the publication of Dr. Zhivago in 1957, which was, per Merton, too Christian, too human, too alive for apparatchik readers:

Pasternak stands out as a gigantic paradox in a world of servile and mercenary conformities…. In some (for instance, the pundits of Soviet literature) this guilt has produced hatred and rage against Pasternak. The fear he aroused was intolerable. His colleagues in the Soviet Writers’ Union7 began to yell for his blood, and yelled all the more loudly in proportion as they were themselves servile and second rate.

A few thousand years before them, here is the prophet Jeremiah on his countrymen threatening to kill him if he continues to speak politically inconvenient prophecies (Jer 11:18-19, NIV):

Because the Lord revealed their plot to me, I knew it, for at that time he showed me what they were doing. I had been like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter; I did not realize that they had plotted against me, saying,

“Let us destroy the tree and its fruit;
let us cut him off from the land of the living,
that his name be remembered no more.”

And here is Eric Abrahamsen in the NYT in 2015, writing about literary censorship and self-censorship in China:

All literary societies probably tend toward cliquishness, but China’s is an especially monolithic old-boy network driven by personal relations. It is also governed by a tendency known as kan ren bu kan zuopin: looking at the writer, not the writing. Yan Lianke, who has often fallen afoul of the system, explained to me by email that, “‘Looking at the writers’ means looking at where they stand on various issues, their loyalties: Do you have the same ethical or artistic standpoint as I do?”

….There are people to take to dinner, tastes to cater to, artistic maxims to uphold. There is also outright corruption, as literary careers are ruined over personal vendettas and prizes are bought and paid for. This structure, and the pressures it creates on authors, would remain in place if Sapprft were disbanded tomorrow.8

Some examples outside of literature can be found in The butterfly catcher. The general pattern is the same. A critical mass of people come to participate in a popular hysteria, delusion, or some other method of consolidating power (指鹿为马), sweeping everyone else along with them. Anyone who resists is destroyed. The question is then whether anyone is left who can still say, knowing the futility of doing so, “No, that is not true. I will not comply.” It does seems to accelerate a society’s return to sanity if someone takes up this function, although that person does not always survive. I don’t know what happens if no one is willing or able to do this. There are fictional depictions of that outcome in We and 1984.

The choice is almost always an individual one,9 but in the end the individual does not matter. This personal insignificance has been acknowledged by some of those who have taken up that function. (“But what does my death matter…” “It does not matter what happens to you.”10) In that sense it is a pure, almost mathematical function, f(x) given any x. Being impersonal and repetitive, the pattern is interesting to study in transparent section—reviving RAPP a century later seems to have disinterred the House Un-American Activities Committee as well11—but once you have perceived the moral requirement and filled it, it is ultimately of no personal importance. A hundred people have done the same thing before you; if you are lucky, a dozen people are doing the same thing now. The function has little to do with you.

When you look into a six-inch reflector at the bright moons of Jupiter, however, or shade your eyes to see the long white threads of snow geese against the mountains—that is life, unrepeated, yours alone. And that is what I wish to remember of this year: the rare moments of kindness, of light breaking through the darkness, of lobster mushrooms blooming under duff and blackbirds alighting on my hand.

To those who showed me kindness when cruelty was fashionable and profitable: thank you. May I remember you always and forget the rest.

Notes

• I will be at in Nashville on Wednesday, October 29, 1-4pm. I would not have known about Rabbit Room, and they would not have known about me, were it not for ’s kind review.

• Since the books are mostly gone from bookstores, with the Rabbit Room being one of a few exceptions, it’s worth noting that On Fragile Waves and Break, Blow, Burn, & Make are half off when directly purchased from Amazon right now. Jewel Box is also discounted.

• Paying subscribers recently received an essay on rivets and a two-part disquisition on writing endings (1, 2).

Before that came an appreciation of Hildegard von Bingen, an overview of the process of pitching and publishing a nonfiction book, and a genealogy of theories of mass behavior running from Gustave Le Bon through Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman to Byung-Chul Han.

Thanks to the seventeenth paid subscriber, joining in June, for the encouraging words, and to the eighteenth as well. Thanks to the other sixteen for reading this far and putting up with the typos that I missed.

Twenty-odd people bought paperback copies of On Fragile Waves after witnessing a fraction of the abuse directed at me, which was a kind and unexpected act. I hope you enjoy it. (Mind you, I deliberately make no money from that particular book.) I’m also grateful to the two or three people who bought copies of Jewel Box and Break, Blow, Burn, and Make. It means more than you know.

I don’t intend to make a habit of mentioning current events, since my aim for The Paper Airplane has always been to write what is useful and lasting,1 but occasionally the present has pedagogical value. This week’s unsurprising U.S. v. Skrmetti decision caused the NYT to finally report accurately and thoroughly, though years late, on the broadening global consensus that what is commonly called pediatric gender medicine has little evidence in its favor. They still fail to mention the Dentons report and the billionaires bankrolling the activism, however.

NYT:

Systematic reviews commissioned by international health bodies have consistently found that the evidence of the benefits of the treatments is weak, as is the evidence on the potential harms.

NYT Magazine:

After seeing an early copy of SOC-8, Levine and [his] staff began pressuring WPATH to drop the new age minimums, arguing that “specific listings of ages, under 18, will result in devastating legislation for trans care,” as the group’s president relayed to colleagues in July 2022. That September, the American Academy of Pediatrics—which had also been provided a preview—followed suit, threatening to publicly oppose SOC-8 if the age minimums were not deleted….

“Everyone was like, holy cow—did Rachel Levine really go out and lobby for 9-year-olds to get surgery?” one former Biden aide told me…..

Cass’s report sent shock waves across the Atlantic. There was “no evidence” that gender-affirming treatments reduced the risk that trans teenagers would die by suicide, her review found. SOC-8’s adolescent chapter lacked “developmental rigor.” And the much-cited consensus of medical associations was a mirage. Few of the groups endorsing gender-affirming care had actually conducted their own in-depth evidence reviews, her team found; instead, nearly all had relied on older Endocrine Society and WPATH guidelines as the basis for their own recommendations.

There was now a dawning awareness within the administration, another Biden aide told me, that its allies in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement had overstated the medical case for pediatric gender-affirming care.

Apart from the commentary by Biden aides, there’s nothing new in the reporting for anyone who has been paying attention, but for those who refuse to consider any evidence contrary to accepted opinion unless it has been printed in the NYT, the articles will be useful.

The trouble—and it is a small, private trouble, for sure, not worth anyone’s notice—is that this leaves me in a quandary.

Do I believe the reviewer(s) who blacklisted me, the friends who turned on me for the sake of party invitations, and the colleagues who denounced me for social clout, will have the decency to apologize for their false accusations and the damage they have done, now that the so-called paper of record has repeated what I said? Now that it has become obvious even to the inattentive that I have, all along, been telling the truth, while my thousands of accusers have been lying?

No is the easy answer, the answer of long experience and observation. I am not the first person to be thrown to the wolves, and have seen no human decency in other cases and expect none in mine. I think now and then of Nina Paley’s “The Banality of Stupid” (2017), which has proven quite accurate in its predictions.

However, the severe and necessary constraint of faith is that I am not permitted to say no. I can grieve, and have been grieving, for those I know who sold their integrity for a spot on a bestseller list, for those who embraced lying for personal advantage, for those who destroyed themselves and others for public approval, for the well-known writer with a reputation for kindness who wrote to me privately: I’m white; I’m never going to prison. Why should I care about women in prison being raped by male inmates?2

But I have to hope that the people I know who threw away their decency, intelligence, and sense for a passing fad will one day have these things restored to them, and know their worth, and never lose them again. I have to pray for this. And I have to believe that it could happen, even if it takes decades—even if I never live to see it.

Job, accused by his friends in the depths of his suffering, in the very next moment had to intercede with God on behalf of those friends. Suso, that gentle Dominican friar, weighed down by slander, embraced and adopted the orphaned infant he was accused of fathering.3 Madeleine L’Engle, accused of betraying a friend, struggled to follow the command in Matt 5:44 and Luke 6:28 to pray for her unknown accuser. At last she was able to say: God bless the bastard.4

God, give guts and gorms to the gutless and gormless. God, forgive them, although they knew what they were doing. Bless the bastards and have mercy on them.

As another writer taught me to pray last week: Bless them. Change me.

Stories

• “A Shell in the Desert” will appear in the anthology Revolution in the Heart, out from Titan Books in October.

• “Down the Interstate” will appear in the anthology The Book of the Dead, expected from Harper Voyager in October.

For the record, since people have been slinging rocks at innocents that should have been aimed at me, stories for anthologies are solicited years in advance of publication. The editor has committed no thoughtcrimes. Leave him alone.

News et cetera

• In December, Makoto Fujimura graciously invited me to the All Saints Forum on Faith and Life, part of which I described in the December essay. An edited transcript of our conversation can be found here.

• On Saturday, January 18, I will be signing books at Silverdale Barnes and Noble from 12 to 5pm.

• You can find a signed copy of Break, Blow, Burn, & Make at the 5th Ave B&N in NYC, downstairs in Religion, or at the Marketfair B&N in NJ. The latter location also has a signed copy of On Fragile Waves. Both books are on the signed editions rack by the registers. (This information may be slightly out of date.)

• Richard Weems on Break, Blow, Burn, & Make for North American Review: “Yu’s faith may be jarring to the contemporary secular mindset at first, but the aim is true without being self-righteous or exclusionary... [H]er conclusions touch on the kind of artistic process found in centuries of thought on the creation of art, and without sentimentality…. [S]he touches on an artistic vision that feels honest and important to remind ourselves of and continue to act on.”

• Alex Mattingly on Break, Blow, Burn, & Make for Radio Free Book Club: “Beautiful meditations on writing, God, and the act of creation. Like the work of Thomas Merton or Thich Nhat Hanh, the depth of Yu’s writing is such that anyone, regardless of religious belief, will find a great deal of wisdom here worth contemplating.”

• Marguerite Sheffer on Jewel Box for Electric Literature: “Stunning.... Yu writes deftly about politics, power, and fragile hope.”

• Paperback editions for both Jewel Box and Break, Blow, Burn, & Make have been delayed, the first one indefinitely, due to low hardcover sales. A pity, since those would have been the corrected editions, but with any luck they’ll be worth the wait.

Much gratitude to those above and others for their kind words.

Pretty much everyone in publishing knows that the majority of celebrity and business memoirs are ghostwritten vanity projects. This can lead to comical situations, such as the headliner of a prominent book festival being interviewed about being an author before an adoring audience, when the smart money says he’s never written any of the books his name is emblazoned on. The better type of celebrity will give the ghostwriter a credit, which is what happened on books where you see:

CELEBRITY NAME

with Unfamiliar Name

I have a bit more respect for those.

While those outside of publishing have historically remained unaware of ghostwriting, it seems to be finally bubbling up into the public consciousness. Vulture had, last week, a tell-all from a poorly paid fiction ghostwriter (in the comments section, a nonfiction ghostwriter expresses horror at the pay), and John Boyne’s The Echo Chamber (2021) features a James Patterson type as one of its main characters.

Alexei Navalny’s Patriot is something else altogether, scratched out bit by bit in prison with difficulty during the hour or so per day in which he is permitted to write. Entire chapters are confiscated by prison guards, vanishing forever. A psychotic murderer who screams day and night is installed in the cell across from his, to keep him from sleeping. He mentions that his two agents are nervous about whether he will be able to complete the book under contract. (This is a good book to give to writers who complain about writing.)

Navalny is deeply erudite, and I would bet on his having read “The Power of the Powerless,” given how frequently he mentions Václav Havel, but he also quotes Rick and Morty. His prose is dense and beautiful, well-written or well-translated or most likely both, with the texture and weight of prose from previous decades. Patriot is also unbelievably funny for a book in which the protagonist dies on page 280 of 479. Navalny does not and cannot stop joking, which is wonderful, because his comedic instinct is perfect.2

The two times he transforms into a serious orator involve his concluding statements in the Yves Rocher trial in 2014 and then in the appeal for the same case, speaking directly to the judge, prosecutor, and other corrupt officials involved in the false accusations and trumped-up charges. From the first:

I understand perfectly that none of you will suddenly leap up and overturn that table, nor will you say, “I’ve had enough of all this!” Neither will the representatives of Yves Rocher stand up and say, “Navalny has convinced us with his eloquent words!” People are made differently. The human consciousness compensates for the feeling of guilt... It’s impossible for you to go home at the end of the day and say to your children or your husband, “You know, today I took part in the sentencing of someone who was clearly innocent. Now I feel really bad about it and will always feel bad.” We don’t do that, because we’re made differently. Either they say, “Alexei Anatolievich, you understand how it is,” or they say, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” Or they’ll say... “If he hadn’t attracted attention to himself, if he hadn’t waved his arms around, if he hadn’t got in people’s way, more than likely everything would have just gone away.”

Nevertheless, at this point in the proceedings it’s very important for me to address those who’ll watch or read my final words. It is, of course, quite useless.... We are fighting for the hearts and minds of those who simply stare at the table and shrug their shoulders. People who, when all they need to do is not do something vile, they go ahead and do it anyway….

Everything is built on lies, on constant lying, do you understand? And the more concrete proof of something that we present to you, the bigger the lies that we come up against....

Why do you put up with these lies? Why do you just stare at the table? I’m sorry if I’m dragging you into a philosophical discussion, but life’s too short to simply stare down at the table. I blinked and I’m almost forty years old.... And at some point we’ll realize that nothing we did had any meaning at all, so why did we just stare at the table and say nothing? The only moments in our lives that count for anything are those when we do the right thing, when we don’t have to look down at the table but can raise our heads and look each other in the eye. Nothing else matters….

Maybe this is going to sound naive, and I know it’s become the norm to laugh ironically and sneer at these words, but I call on absolutely everyone not to live by lies.3 There is no other way. There can be no other solution in our country today.4

Speaking at the end of the appeal:

Really, Your Honor, I’m not sure anymore what to talk about. Do you think, perhaps, we should talk about God?…

Recently someone wrote me… “Didn’t you say a while back in an interview that you believe in God, and it says in the Bible, ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be fulfilled.’ Well, that’s great. You’ve got it made!” and I thought, How about that! How well this person understands me….

That’s why, while of course I’m not particularly enjoying my present situation, I feel no regret about having returned here and what I’m doing. Because everything I did was right. On the contrary, I feel, well, a certain satisfaction. Because at a difficult moment I did as I was supposed to and didn’t fall short of that precept.5

The last paragraph of the book, of course, threw me across the room.

Since it’s generally churlish to reveal the last line or paragraph of a book, here’s the back cover instead:

Nobody will believe me when I say that prior to last month’s Nobel Prize announcement I was preparing to preface the next two recommendations with the observation that some of the best storytelling today is coming from South Korea.6 It is nonetheless true. And while it is risky to suggest works in progress that have not ended yet, I think both of these will be placed behind a paywall when complete, and both seem to be drawing close to their conclusions. Therefore, accepting no responsibility whatsoever for anyone’s lost sleep:

• Muse on Fame is a beautifully illustrated meditation on the often irreconcilable demands of art and life. The artist-author demonstrates such extensive knowledge of the entertainment industry that I suspect direct film/TV production experience.7

• The Greatest Estate Developer is the strangest adventure in civil engineering I have ever read. I am not entirely sure how a Korean manhwa manages to incorporate West Side Story, Pokemon, Spongebob, and F1 racing into a cohesive whole, but it does.

I advise against opening either if you are going to operate heavy machinery, conduct high-stakes negotiations, or drive long distances the next day. Thank me later.

I also found Schwalbe et al. 2024, “When Politics Trumps Truth: Political Concordance Versus Veracity as a Determinant of Believing, Sharing, and Recalling the News,” worth reading (it’s a very nicely designed study), along with the the November/December 2024 issue of Skeptical Inquirer, especially “Science Over Party,” which is sweetly, earnestly innocent.

News and such

• Didn’t mention it before, but Jewel Box was also a finalist for the Washington State Book Award.

• While Jewel Box didn’t win a World Fantasy Award, The Book of Witches, containing my story “Witchfires,” did. Congratulations to editor Jonathan Strahan and the other talented writers therein.

• Anna A. Friedrich, reviewing for The Rabbit Room, calls Break, Blow, Burn, and Make “a delight—fresh, clear, energizing, convicting, practical, and winsome.”

• In The Englewood Review of Books, Tommy Welty calls Break, Blow, Burn, and Make “deftly written” and praises its “clarity of thought, careful arguments, and precision of language.”

• Editor Rich Horton writes: “Break, Blow, Burn & Make is beautifully written, boldly argued, blessedly inspiring.”

• Last month I was down at Reed College as a Visiting Writer and was delighted by the faculty and students there. My thanks to all of them for their curiosity and graciousness.

• I was recently inducted into my public high school’s Hall of Honor, which matters not one bit to anyone who didn’t go or teach or work there but delights me greatly.