How Long the Lonely Road

Today is a very special day, but it might not seem like one. This is not the transition from middle school to high school – we did that last year. And you’re not going from IGCSEs to A Levels – that won’t happen until next year. It’s also not the big moment when you leave high school and enter something like adult life. That’s three years away, which really isn’t that long if you think about it. After all, it’s already been three years since Skibidi Toilet first appeared. I want to talk about time, because I’ve heard a lot of students tell me how insignificant this moment is, and I disagree. But I also see the problem. The problem with living in time is that we get so caught up looking at the past and worrying about the future that the present becomes like a single point in geometry. A position without breadth and magnitude. A calendar of assignments and alerts. A schedule of tasks that doesn’t leave time for anything to just happen.  The twentieth century’s greatest minds, includi...

On Thursday, June 12, it was my pleasure to present a lecture titled “What Do Destructive Cults, Violent Religious Extremism, Far Right Militias & Conspiracy Theories Have In Common?” at a TEDxYouth event organized by some wonderful students at my school. The basic conceit was to apply classic concepts in the typology of religion developed by Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge to several groups that have gained traction by exploiting modern feelings of isolation and powerlessness. “Everywhere under Heaven is in great disarray,” says the Zhuangzi, a third century BCE book of Taoist wisdom—“the whole world tends to see only one aspect and think that they ahve grasped the whole of it.” O tempora o mores  is hardly a fresh complaint in the long record of social unrest, nor is violent extremism a new response. But the groups that take advantage of this all too human tendency to seek simple, self-affirming answers can and must be avoided. The solutions offered by these movements are...