In recent years, I have been on a "journey to the end of childhood," going back to reread authors and thinkers I admired in my teen and college years, and finding that many of them expressed despicable social views of racism, anti-Semitism, etc., that I either did not notice or naively forgave the first time I read their works.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, for example, is an author I thought so groundbreaking and brilliant, so wittily cynical, when I first read "Journey to the End of Night" and "Death on the Installment Plan" back in the early 1980s. Now I see the hatred toward humanity and toward Jews in particular, despite the admittedly fine writing style. I relate this to all the right-wing assholes of the world, then and now, who love the idea of "burning it all down" because, when they envision their dream scenario of world conflagration, they always assume that they will be safe and will survive to enjoy the supposedly wonderful new world that will rise from the ashes of a million crematoria, and that is the OTHERS who will suffer and be destroyed.
It is also notable that many such asshole thinkers were often coddled geniuses able to cultivate their bilious ideas into works of literature, art or philosophy because others around them, whether parents, spouses or others, put up with their bullshit and gave them the kind of love and support that they themselves would never dream of providing to other struggling or suffering people--because when you are a superior being, it is beneath you to feel compassion for others! What can we learn from this? The important lesson, I suppose, is if you want to succeed as a writer or artist, be as much of an asshole as possible, and the world may well reward you!
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