Enjoy Your Holiday: On the Weaponization of Kindness

In Europe, the word holiday can refer to what in America is called a vacation, which of course can occur whether or not the vacation falls on a national holiday. Regarding the latter, the official designation of a holiday by a government renders the holiday valid anywhere in the country’s territory. This does not mean that very resident or even citizen is duty-bound to pay any attention to a given national holiday, but deciding not to celebrating a holiday does not thereby mean that it is not legitimate and thus valid. Deliberately acting out from the instinctual urge of passive aggression by refusing even to say the name of a national holiday in public discourse, as if a personal decision not to celebrate a national holiday eviscerates it on the national calendar can be viewed as a case of hyperextended projection from a personal dislike to the personal desire to cancel the national holiday, as if a personal dislike could nullify a national law or proclamation. Behind the passive aggression is none other than selfishness, which implies loving oneself over loving God. Theological (rather than psychological) self-love renders the world as a projection of the self, including its narrowly circumscribed (to private benefits only) interests. Hence, the unrestrained ego leaps from its own dislike to being entitled to unilaterally, as a private actor, nullify an officially designated national holiday as null and void. I contend that Nietzsche’s philosophy can shed some light on this modern phenomenon concerning Christmas, an official U.S. holiday. Kindness as actually passive aggression is tailor-made for Nietzsche’s eviscerating scalpel, which he wielded to expose the power-aggrandizement being exercised under the disguise of the moral injunction of Thou Shalt Not!

Nietzsche, late nineteenth-century European philosopher, theorized that the weak seek to beguile the strong by pressuring the latter to be ashamed of being strong, which includes being self-confident rather than resentful. Whereas the strong designate the weak merely as bad, the weak, who resort even to cruelty as a desperate means of feeling the pleasure of power, the weak label the strong as evil. The asymmetry here leaps off the page! Such seething loathing of the strong is itself an indication of the deplorable weak constitution of the weak, especially those who are too weak to master their intractable urge to dominate. The strong are strong enough to master their most intractable instinctual urge, so any resentment toward the herd animals is mastered such that they are merely bad, rather than evil. With such internal mastery, the strong can bathe in their self-confidence, out of which generosity naturally flows. Even in regarding the resentful weak as merely bad rather than as evil, the strong can be viewed as being generous, for the attitude of the weak toward the strong is indeed sordid and even toxic. Therefore, Nietzsche suggests that the strong maintain a pathos of distance, which can be interpreted both as social distance and emotional distance, from the ill herd lest the strong too become sick. The shift to “happy holiday” instead of “Merry Christmas” had by 2024 become so ubiquitous in public without any official mandate that a herd mentality can be inferred.

It is not enough for the resentful weak to refuse to celebrate a national holiday, such as Christmas or even Thanksgiving (who doesn’t like food?); the weak who seek to dominate the strong, in spite of the obvious point of being weaker both in terms of external and inner power, actively attempt to beguile the strong into being ashamed even for saying the word Christmas in public! The American retail sector has been acting as an enabler for the weak by tacitly refusing to recognize Christmas even though stores are almost all closed on Christmas Day. The retail executives and middle managers who espouse passive-aggression by directing employees not to say, “Merry Christmas” even on the day before Christmas; instead, customers buying Christmas presents are accosted with the inherently passive aggressive, “Enjoy your holiday” as a looping recording blasted out throughout the store, “This holiday, . . .” A national holiday is by definition not your holiday, as the holiday is officially recognized within the territory of the nation.

As if turning on a dime, every year on December 26^th, public discourse suddenly reverts back to being able to say the name of the next holiday, New Year’s Day, without any hint of the previous month of “Happy Holiday” and “Enjoy your holiday.” Making this switch it itself a passive aggressive slap on Santa’s rosy cheeks. As an experiment one year, I turned to “Enjoy your holiday” after Christmas whenever a stranger (including retail employees!) said, “Happy New Year.” More than once, the other person was offended. Imagine if I were to say, “Enjoy your holiday,” to a Black American on Martin Luther King Day in January. Naturally, the person would take offense, as the explicit implication would be that the holiday is only valid for Black people even though it is a national holiday. Were I to apply the phrase to July 4^th, which is Independence Day in the U.S., I would be implying that I am against that nation. Were I to say, “Enjoy your holiday” on Thanksgiving and even go so far in passive aggression to insist that the holiday be called a day of mourning (even though the holiday is based on a peaceful feast in 1620 attended both by American Indians and European settlers in Massachusetts), my resentment would (or should) be quite evident to other people. Were I to inform people in public places, including stores, not only that they cannot say Thanksgiving, but also that they must refer to the holiday as the Day of Mourning, the hearers could legitimately call me out for not only stubbornly refusing to admit that Thanksgiving is a national holiday, but also imposing my own ideology as if everyone else must speak in line with it. One year at a “Holiday Party” at my alma mater, Yale, an employee replied to me, “We can’t say that,” after I had quietly observed that it was really a Christmas party. We can’t? Was a law passed in Connecticut prohibiting people from using the words, “Christmas Party” even at a private university? It is precisely the default of can’t as if its pronouncement were a jurisprudential fact of reason that I wish to expose and eviscerate as not only sordid, but enabling too.

There is a qualitative difference between personal and public holidays. To unilaterally, whether as an individual of a member of a group, implicitly castigate people even for saying the name of a public holiday as if it were a personal holiday, whether of an individual (e.g., a birthday) or a group (e.g., the Solstices, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, Hanukkah, Devali, and Quanza) is to conflate two different categories. In fact, a third category exists: holidays that are not official national holidays and yet are not limited to a group and thus are de facto (rather than de jure) public in nature (e.g., Halloween and Valentine’s Day, and perhaps St. Patrick’s Day, as drinking green beer is hardly limited to Americans under 40 of Irish ancestry). Were there no difference between private and national (and even de facto public) holidays, then governments would hardly go to the trouble of proclaiming national holidays, which of course are explicitly valid officially valid throughout a country. I turn now to some implications.  

Firstly, that everyone does not celebrate a national (or de facto public) holiday does not nullify that holiday. In fact, it is ridiculous for a person to claim that because one does not like or do anything on a given national holiday, it is therefore not really even a legal holiday. 

Secondly, that a number of private, group-only holidays occur in the same month as a national (and even a public) holiday does not mean that people should not refer in public to the national holiday by name. In the U.S., there is only one national (and public) holiday in the month of December; Americans don’t say “happy holidays” leading up to Halloween even though Veterans Day is not far behind in November.

Thirdly, the fact that a group relishes a certain national (or otherwise public) holiday does not render that holiday only private, and thus devoid of any broader meaning or significance. If the group is religious in nature, this does not necessarily mean that the public holiday is religious. For other religious groups to stubbornly suppose so in utter resentment and jealousy ignores the separation of “church and state” in the U.S. Constitution, which bars Congress from establishing a religion and thus proclaiming a religious interpretation or origin of a public holiday. A secular holiday can be proclaimed as such and thus clear the bar of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution even if a religious group celebrates the holiday in a non-secular way and even if the holiday itself had a distinctly religious origin. Halloween, for example, which admittedly is not a U.S. national holiday but it generally observed nonetheless (rather than being a group holiday) had by the twenty-first century become almost completely secular in America even though it is on the eve of All Saints Day in Christianity. The latter does not negate or nullify the secular holiday of Halloween; children need not accept the Nicene Creed in order to put on costumes and go trick-or-treating for candy. As for Christmas, the distinctly Christian feast of it is not theologically significant as neither the Incarnation or the Resurrection are celebrated on December 25th, for the Incarnation is celebrated on March 25^th—nine months before December 25^th, and the Resurrection is celebrated on Easter in March or April. It is a blunder, therefore, to assume not only that there is no secular holiday (e.g., gift-giving, Santa, and even Frosty the Snowman), but also that that even the religious holiday marks anything distinctly theological (qua  supernatural)!  Jealousy and resentment can indeed be blinding, or at the very least have a distorting effect on a person’s emotions, cognitions and perception.

For an advocate of a group-limited private holiday not only to refuse to admit that a public holiday is such a holiday, but also to insist that other people cannot acknowledge and even say the name of such a holiday in public simply goes too far. Resentful selfishness that resorts to passive aggression is indeed evil, for to insist that other people abide by a social reality that is a projection of the selfish self denies that none of us are deities. That is, self-love over love directed to God is the root sin behind the over-reach here. To counter such evil, I recommend that people in the U.S. say “Happy Holiday” and “Enjoy your holiday” for every holiday except Christmas, even to retail clerks. Even though most people might be confused, others—the more insightful—will get the passive-aggressive message that it is unfair to single out a certain national holiday as non grata and even as forbidden in public discourse. The main point is of course that passive aggression should be rendered transparent so that its beguiling and hateful spite can be weakened, as befitting the weak who tacitly, yet intentionally nonetheless, weaponize the phenomenon of holidays.

That the American retail sector enables this weaponization renders companies as de facto accomplices, and thus hardly as neutral parties. To the extent that American culture reflects the retail culture, including its nomenclature and mannerisms, the responsibility of business not to perpetuate and enforce a specific passive-aggressive ideology whose source is exogenous to business is all the greater. By interiorizing such an ideology, a store (i.e., its employees, including store managers) becomes passive aggressive and thus deserves push-back from resentful customers. The irony is that the store managers and even their executives at company headquarters intend precisely to avoid offending customers. Including the name of all national holidays, rather than substituting this holiday or happy holidays for one such holiday both in the stores and in advertisements, is a legitimate and fair alternative marketing (retail) strategy. That some customers might be offended just by the name of a specific public holiday is no reason for the dog to be led by its tail. Being led by oversensitive ideologically-driven customers is not socially responsible, as it is not fair to all of the strong, self-confident customers who are willing to generously spend in the midst of celebrating a national holiday. For a national, public holiday is a statement that a certain holiday is legitimate and thus valid in a country, even though not every resident necessarily does anything to mark the holiday and some residents, even citizens, may be personally opposed. To be sure, the latter have a protected political right to oppose something based on an ideology, but they do not have the authority to impose that ideology to limit the free speech of other people, not to mention to unilaterally cancel a national holiday. Such a holiday is valid whether its opponents like it or not, and the latter do not have the right to cancel the free-speech of other people who wish to specify even just the specific name of such a holiday. Arrogance looking down on the rest of us from the stilts of false-entitlement is indeed unbecoming of anyone. 

The University of California at Berkeley

In visiting a university even for a short period of time, a surprisingly deep grasp of its dominant organizational culture's mentality is possible, especially if it is foreign to the outsider's perspective and yet draws on  instinctual urges whose imprints one has previously seen. It is perhaps human, all too human to relish sending harsh messages to outsiders, albeit indirectly because cowardness and self-illusion are included with the appetite for blood. This can be so at a university even if scholarly visitors are among the targets. The primitive instinctual urge to aggressively harm people by reminding them unnecessarily that they are not in the tribe can have sufficient power to overcome other contending urges to characterize the very culture of an organization. I will argue that the University of California at Berkeley can be characterized as such. For I witnessed this triumphant urge in rather  obvious behavior of some faculty and administrators. I came rather quickly during my visit to grasp the nature and roots of the favorite blood-sport of enough rude faculty members to get a picture of those primped  up, intellectually stunted "scholars" at that heavily passive aggressive university. The message of exclusion for taxpayers visiting the campus and scholars invited to give a lecture there, I being neither, was made clear to me by a student employee at the main library,  which tellingly is closed on Saturdays even during the semesters: Even if a visitor on the large campus does not have an umbrella and rain is pouring down, the university's shuttle buses are only for students, faculty, and staff. The student enjoyed his power to say no to me; I could not detect even the slightest tone of shame in representing such an inhospitable institutional host. Bad air! Instead, the he relished the firmness in the power to say no, which is to say, to exclude. In contrast, the campus shuttles at Yale, ironically a private university, transport anyone around campus! So much for California being easy-going. So much for UC Berkeley sporting intellectually curious and passionate scholars in search of new ideas from visitors. Rather, Nietzsche’s new birds of prey, whose spite naturally issues out from deep ressentement, populate the faculty and their bosses. So much for even common courtesy and gratitude to California taxpayers and distinguished professors from other universities invited to deliver a lecture; if you are walking around campus or walk out of a library and get wet, tough luck! Public is apparently below even common. 

While visiting California, I spent some time on UC’s main campus. I was "testing the waters" on signing on to be a visiting scholar there. I was dissuaded from any such elongated affiliation within days, however, because the director of that university's visiting scholar's program (such scholars merely use the libraries) refused even to meet with me. Because the program at the time charged $750 for the first year and $1,500 for the second year for what is essentially access to the libraries with a university ID (and use of the campus shuttles), it was entirely reasonable for me to discuss the program with its director, but, alas, she was too important for that, and thus lost some revenue as a result. Her reply to my email went beyond rude dismissiveness. 

I met enough faculty, nonacademic administrators, and doctoral students, moreover, to be able to quickly grasp the university's organizational culture, which, incidentally, I found locals knew of surprisingly accurately. One retired scholar who had studied at the University of San Francisco told me that the faculty and faculty-administrators at Berkeley (Cal) only value certain scholars as colleagues, and meanwhile make it intentionally clear to others that they are not wanted. This is the antithesis of scholarly collegial courtesy. This is the bottom line that scholars visiting Berkeley should know. 

I witnessed and in fact was subject to the passive-aggressive rude behavior of the director of the university’s Institute of European Studies as he apparently quickly sized me up and reneged on his offer to meet with me concerning my scholarship on the E.U. and U.S. (perhaps this comparison put him off), and then rather blatantly excluded me (and another Yale alum) from his introductions of faculty to each other as we waited to hear a lecture on Churchill. The director, having blown off meeting with me by writing that maybe he would see me at a talk or two, literally stood over the two seated Yalies—myself and a retired Yale College graduate—in the small seating area while introducing his colleagues (actually coworkers) to each other. This explains the lack of scholarly collegiality being extended to scholars from other universities; academic courtesy does not extend to everyone who holds the Ph.D. degree; rather, academic colleague only pertains to the faculty at his university, Cal. During the reception after the talk, he looked over and laughed at me at one point, which explains why he blew off my email so blatantly, and it was clear to me that he had dissuaded the speaker and a similar fellow from speaking with me. I was not alone in noticing this; a local retired restauranteer observed it too. One student working at the wine table told me that it was typical behavior at that university, and the other student working there told me that the faculty in the philosophy department are known for being particularly nasty. 

For example, a senior professor of ethics said to me as soon as I told him that I had gone to Yale, "Cal is every bit as good academically as Yale." We could throw Harvard in too. Well, the rankings simply don't support that view. Neither does even a quick contrast between the main reading room of Sterling Library at Yale, where you can hear a pin drop even when the all of the chairs are occupied with even plenty of undergraduate students, and the reading room in Doe Library at Berkeley, where ongoing conversations are not only ongoing, but also stubbornly so. The immaturity and inconsiderateness alone bely any claim to intellectual maturity. So too does the starkly different occupancy levels in the two reading rooms on school nights. One of my favorite phrases is, the proof is in the pudding. Sterling library is open every day during the semesters (except holidays); in contrast, Doe Library, and thus its periodical and reference rooms, is closed on Saturdays even during semesters. There is no film library (the film archive's "library" label is a bloated misnomer), whereas one is housed on the seventh floor of Sterling Library at Yale. Perhaps the biggest difference lies in the capabilities of the managers and the student employees of the respective libraries, especially in fixing problems versus pretending that they simply do not exist. Inflexibly adhering to a broken status quo is a basic sin of management. 

 

Although the weather is better in Berkeley than in New Haven, and the interpersonal climate is admittedly harsh at both universities, the faculty (and faculty administrators) at Berkeley stuck me as particularly hostile with regard to visitors (whereas too many Yale employees, including faculty and fundraisers, relish intentionally inflicting anger by excluding some insider groups but not others). The ethics professor at Berkeley, whom I had emailed in vain before my arrival and met at a talk, even felt inclined to insult Yale in talking with me. "I bet its cosy and accommodating there," he said with a smart-ass. demeaning tone. He clearly didn’t realize that a cosy and accommodating organizational culture is a good thing. I could gleam from his assumption that the cultural mentality dominant at his university was not at all cosy and accommodating, and definitely not to visiters! Not welcoming for sure. Nevertheless, I was polite; I held myself back from replying that being cosy and accomodating is better than being frosty and hostile towards visitors.

Regarding visiting scholars who affiliate with the university  library to do their own research for a year or two, I found out that that UC charges them $750 for the first year, and $1,500 for the second. This implies not only a certain institutional greediness, but also an implicit refusal to extend collegial courtesy to scholars, which is to say holders of true doctoral degrees (e.g., Ph.D., Ed.D., J.S.D., D.Sci.M., D.B.A., and Th.D.). I don't understand why a scholar would stay there even a few months, given how dismissively faculty regard outsiders not on the faculty. You’re not one of us is a very primitive, tribal instinctual urge that Nietzsche would likely say is out of control in the weak who seek nonetheless to dominate even the strong. I saw a lot of passive aggressive weakly constituted inhabitants on what is outwardly a very beautiful campus during my visit to the Bay Area.

 

I've hardly been uncritical of Yale in my writings, but this has ultimately been geared to improving the university by raising awareness among my fellow alums of the wordening atmosphere on campus. In contrast, I don't think the conceited mentality of bloated intellect and primitive ill-will towards people deemed "outsiders" at Cal deserve the fruits that come from improvement. A professor in Cal’s law school had gone to Yale; I met him in person at Cal on the second day of my visit. He claimed to have left teaching at Yale because of the toxicity at Yale’s law school, that toxicity being definitely true, but in not replying to my subsequent emails, he too seemed rather toxic to me; perhaps one toxic organizational culture had spit him out and he subsequently added to the toxicity of another university. I attended a talk at that law school during my visit. Tellingly, the event coordinator took over the Q&A when the speaker from Harvard would have called on me. I left immediately,  disgusted even as I passed the awaiting reception food. A bad odor nixes even good food.

 

Even doctoral students at Cal talked down to me as if they were spoiled, immature children dismissive of an adult. I told them that I am a scholar visiting from somewhere else and had studied at Yale, but I was to be put in my place anyway. The philosophy students whom I met, both undergraduates and doctoral students, seemed eerily to resemble so closely the immaturity and the abrupt anti-social characteristic of the philosophy professors I had met that I couldn’t help but remember that an apple doesn’t fall far from its tree. Paul wrote that you can know a tree from its fruit. Who would stay long in a room of pretentious,  rotting fruit?

 

To illustrate: I sat in on two lectures in a class on Nietzsche; the professor, it seems, was incapable of replying to emails that she herself admitted she had received, and her graduate student behaved quite boorish to me. “I’ll take those!” he harshly as I was returning extra copies of a handout to the professor. That student had heard me introduce myself as a scholar from elsewhere at another talk (where I had met the "ethics" guy)  I complied with the teaching assistant politely; had I been equally demanding and disrespectful, I would have put the copies on the professor’s desk, and told her disciple, you need to go through your professor rather than talk to me directly. After all, he was not even a colleague. 

Besides applying reason to master that temptation into fueling my decision not to return even though I was keenly interested in Nietzsche’s startlingly paradigmatic philosophy. Days later, an undergraduate student majoring in philosophy admitted to me at a reception that that department is even more toxic than the university moreover. It is nice to have one's hunches confirmed. When I had been a student at Yale, it was common to avoid the philosophy department there, as it was not yet in recovery from the toxic implosion from contending personalities that had nearly rid that department of its faculty. That such deep thinking as philosophy encourages could be associated with such petty, even mean people would seem to defy some natural law.  

 

Perhaps a dysfunctional organizational culture is simply a tree whose fruit is sour. Such culture is notoriously difficult to change. Besides the sheer number of people who conveniently conform to viciousness to feel a sense of belonging—of being on the inside—and to feel plearure by excluding outsiders, group-think is very hard and thick against internal and external second-guessing. The sheer distance between an organization’s leader and the herd animals who reside within an organization enables the status quo to continue even as the organization’s own message to itself and society is quite different. I think a dysfunctional organization must decline quite a bit before its inhabitants have to recognize that being more welcoming is in their own self-interest.

More than one local resident in Berkeley told me that in part due to budget cuts from the government of California, Cal-Berkeley had been in a slow decline for twenty years. “They feel threatened and are defensive,” I was told by more than one scholar who lived in San Francisco at the time of my visit. One such scholar, who had received her doctorate at the University of San Francisco, said, “The faculty at Cal want specific people; they treat them like shit. If they have sized you up even as a visitor, it won't get better.” That is to say, the faculty administrators, like the director of European Studies, and the faculty quickly size outsiders up and are not shy about slamming the door shut in a way that is intended to say, you aren’t worth anything to us, but other people are. That mentality is quite toxic and yet it can thrive because of the pleasure that is gained by self-love from exercising the underlying sordid instinctual urge. According to Nietzsche, the strong are able to master even their most intractable urge, whereas the weak cannot. Hence they are slaves to it.  This is perhaps partly why the weak resent the strong and try to bring them down, such as by insisting that a university saturated with immaturity and hostile pettiness  is nonetheless equivalent academically to a Yale or Harvard. Such a claim, made by such people, belies its own validity and actually makes transparent the probable thesis that petty, immature professors don’t come up with mind-blowing new theories that are paradigmatic. Instead, such "scholars" are pedestrian academics.  

Yale Vipers

Even though it is sometimes difficult to "read between the lines" to assess whether or not people in an organization are welcoming or tacitly "showing you the door," the message is undoubtable and even palpable when "all the arrows are pointing in the same direction." In the case of Yale, where I have been an alumni scholar temporarily in residence during the 2023-2024 year, the university's administration could do its alumni a big favor by explicitly saying that we are not welcome back on campus, except to visit and of course donate money. Instead, passive aggression, unaccountability, and even unwarranted retaliation rule the roust there, in what is a toxic organizational culture. 

Since I have been back in residence doing research this year, I have unfortunately had to put up with non-academic employees telling me that Yale alumni, including more specifically those who are themselves scholars back on campus for a term or two to work on research as academics, are not "members of the Yale community." This is particularly rich when the person is not a student or faculty, but is instead a non-academic employee. Even the divinity school's Alumni Engagement director, Barbara Sabia, told me in person that I am not really a member of the Yale community, even though my connection to Yale is academic and her own is not; she was fixated on Yale's ID that students, faculty, and staff have (alumni doing research have different Yale ID, which Sabia decided is not a real Yale ID). Zero donations from me to Yale's "Christian" seminary. 

I've also been profiled by Yale security employees (whom, I must say, need to take it "down a notch"; they aren't prison guards). 

He was not even supposed to be in that lobby

He was circling me because I had looked at the building directory.

Last but hardly least, although Yale advertises to alumni that we can return to campus to audit courses, almost all of the faculty whom I asked rudely gave truly pathetic excuses as to why they don't allow auditors; some don't even distinguish between students and alumni in the making of the requests. Seminars are off limits, even for visiting scholars wanting to attend some of the lectures strictly for research purposes, and even then no participation is allowed (hence falling short audit in this way too). This sets up a "bait and switch" situation for alumni who return in part to audit courses. I returned in part to do so, but the faculty have been so rude that I have demurred. Even in trying to get to guest lectures on campus, I have been distressed that my Yale ID does not permit me access to classroom buildings. I did attend some lectures of a large lecture class in the fall, but the professor ignored my presence and later refused to give me the information on when her make-up lecture would be; her graduate-student teaching assistant reneged with impunity. All of the arrows were pointing in the same way; I didn't even retain the notes I had taken of some of the lectures, and I do not plan to cite the professor, as academic discourtesy goes both ways. I had contacted another professor, Teresa Morgan, before I arrived at Yale to request to audit her course. She demurred, saying that she was near her enrollment cap (even though alumni don't count against that cap and there was ample room), so I replied that I would wait until she gives the go-ahead after the first class. When I contacted her, as she did not follow up with me, she said, "I'm going to have to reconsider your audit because you missed the first class and there was a lot of important material in it." I wrote that I had taken the decision not to audit her class, to which she wrote, "That's fine!" No, that was very fine. 

For less than a month during the spring semester, I had been attending lectures by Kevin Elliot that he gives to his EP&E (ethics, politics, and economics) undergraduate class. I had made clear that I was not auditing the entire course, as I would be attending only several lectures directly relevant to my current research project. In other words, I approached him as a scholar rather than as an alumnus. My mistake with Yale, given the wholesale disrespect for scholars not on the faculty, was to do scholarship as an alum. The previous semester, even before I had arrived in New Haven, I had requested Shelly Kagan's permission to audit his EP&E course; I had read most of his ethics book and wanted to solidfy my grasp of normative ethics. But he kept referring to me as "another student" and said that even with my seven years of philosophy, "It would not be fair to the other students for me to audit the undergraduate course without having taken the prerequisite course. Only months later did I learn that Yale does not even track prerequisites, so Kagan is not able to do so. So what I got was a dish of arrogance, rudeness, and the refusal to extend academic courtesy to an academic colleague even though I am an alum. 

Although Elliot's lectures in late January and early February were very relevant to my current research, this would not be true of his lectures after the spring break. Because I had encountered so many faculty who had quite rudely refused to allow me to audit their courses last semester, I had decided not to audit any classes anyway. I contend that a scholar listening to another scholar's lecture is not the same thing as auditing an entire course. 

On February 7, 2024, as the house at 31 Hillhouse that houses Elliot's office and classroom was locked even on school days (and half of his class during the fall term had not been able to enter the building!), I asked the department secretary to open the front door for me. She refused, even though it was quite cold outside and there was no reason to doubt me (and she could have consulted with Elliot). Eventually, she told a student that the student could size me up and decide whether to let me in. The secretary's distrust was palpable, and thus very insulting. When I had been a student at Yale, the university go along just fine without locking classroom buildings and having security guards and its private police employees on every corner even during school days. I submit that the secretary was paranoid and passive aggressive even to alumni; I would have shown her my Yale ID, but she refused even to come to the front door. Petty.

I spoke by phone to Jocelyn Kane of Yale's Alumni Fund because I thought she would have a financial incentive to see that employees do not treat alumni so rudely and as if we are lethal threats. However, Ms. Kane almost immediately laid into me for auditing without going through "the proper procedures," and of course for not paying a heafy fee, which I would not do anyway as I would not be allowed to speak in class. I explained to her that Kevin Elliot had acted on the basis of collegial courtesy to another scholar in inviting me to attend his lectures that would be useful to my specific research, and that that basis is distinct from course auditing. For one thing, a visiting scholar does not participate in class, and does not typically intend to attend all of the lectures. The point is to extract specific material that is highly relevant to one's current research rather than to attend a class. 

But Ms. Kane dismissed my academic credentials and decided she knew better even though she is a non-academic employee. Somehow, from her doubtlessly, either directly or indirectly,  Kevin Elliot got the word that I would have to audit the course in order even just to listen to four or five lectures. It did not escape my notice that in so doing, Ms. Kane was not oriented to address the secretary's rude conduct toward me, and presumably not those of the faculty whom I had told her had not open to alumni auditing courses anyway. At the very least, she should have been sympathetic rather than having me in her sights. Clearly, she instantly oriented to reporting me rather than helping me. Zero donations would come from me to Yale's development office. 

Ms Kane's inability or unwillness to master her own instinctual urge to retaliate even against an alum reporting bad, and even hostile, treatment on campus evinced an overwhelming desire to "turn the tables" on people. I suspect that his mean weakness is eched in the school's organizational culture, for back in September, I had written to Yale's transportation department to report that a supervisor, Shelly, at Transdev, the subcontracted company that operates Yale's shuttles, had thrice shouted over me when I had asked if a shuttle could pick me up at the West Haven train station on that shuttle's return trip to Yale's main campus, as some dispatchers and a driver had allowed and suggested, respectively, the practice. The employee at Yale was instantly obsessed on getting my "Yale NetID" to verify me rather than to "have my back" in going after Shelly. I submit that this fits the same pattern as that which Ms. Kane evinced. It may be that this dynamic is distinct and even epitomizes Yale's dysfunctional organizational culture. 

Weeks later, I happened to meet Yale's "Dean of Ministry," a high position in Yale's divinity school. I said that generally speaking, Yale's faculty don't want alumni anywhere near the classroom, which means that Yale's promotional claim that alumni can audit courses is misleading. The ministry dean dismissively said, "We just say it's possible," to which I replied, "Not to Yale's faculty." Rather than apologize once he realized that what I was trying to describe is essentially the "bait and switch" unethical sales tactic in business, the expert on Christian ministry quickly turned his back on me and walked away under the cover of the night. I wonder what kind of ministry he advocates to his students. Evidently not that they should apologize when they or their respective churches have wronged someone. In a dysfunctional organizational culture, apologizing is weakness. I guess it's not Christian either. That's interesting in part because I was on my way to Yale's divinity school to hear a lecture on moral theology from Rowan Williams, a retired Archbishop of Canterbury. I wonder if he realized that he was in a festpool of hypocritical vipers.

All this leaves a very bad taste in my mouth concerning not only the lack of accountability at Yale, but also the taint of vituperation and and the instinctual urge to retaliate, essentially to "turn the tables" on alumni even by a manager whose task it is to ask alumni for donations! As a rationalist (and yet also a Nietzschean), I wonder whether Ms. Kane has any cognitive dissodence in that her squalid attitude and conduct towards at least one alum contradicts her fundraising task. I also wonder whether she realizes how inappropriate and unsightly it is for a non-academic employee to dismiss what a scholar says about academic courtesy and research. 

In general, I don't like the meanness that I've encountered from non-academic employees and faculty at Yale. All of their arrows point in the same direction: alumni are not members of the Yale community. To be so brazen as to explicitly tell alumni who are on campus for a term or two that we are not members of the Yale community goes beyond being a pathetic fundraising strategy; the underlying psychology is in need of a Nietzschean critique. The weak who seek to dominate resent the strong because the weak, "new birds of prey," know that they do not have the inner constitution to be innately strong. Hence, the weak are full of resentment. This sordid mentality saturates Yale's faculty and non-academic faculty. 

I might add that I raised concerns about the comments that alumni are not members of the Yale community and on the hostility of security guards who have profiled me without cause to Yale's president, the dean of Yale College, and even to Weili Cheng, the director of Yale's Alumni Association, but nothing changed through the year. In person, Cheng was dismissive. I had already contacted her organization about the hostile security guards, and when I mentioned this to her, she said, quite dismissively and even in a hostile tone, "Oh, you," and then immediately turned her back to me and walked away. Nice. 

From my experience, both Yale's development office and alumni association are hostile rather than helpful to alumni who are back on campus for academic purposes, and the faculty are absolutely not on board with the university's policy (and promotions) on alumni being able to audit courses. Even the faculty's understanding of what it means to audit a course is conveniently deficient. I would like to leave you with this observation: I am truly perflexed as to the extent that arrogance and even meanness can trump rationality. Of course, Nietzsche wrote that the content of reason (and ideas) is instinctual urges, and reasoning itself is the tussle of contending urges seeking dominance over other, competing urges. At least it can be said that reasoning is impacted, or even warped, by a person's instinctual urges. So when a faculty employee at Yale's divinity school teaches that a country should not have borders, that the family unit should be abolished, and that monogamy (and even marriage) oppresses "other lifestyles," I am under no illusion that reason is in the driver's seat. 

Patrick Riley: An Antiquarian Scholar of Justice as Love and Benevolence

In the 2000s, I had the honor of studying under Patrick Riley, a scholar of historical moral, religious, and political thought. Even though I had had "old-school" professors in the course of my degreed studies at Indiana University and Yale, Riley's approach can be said to be medieval. After four years of auditing his courses and those of many of other professors at Riley's request at a large Midwestern university, I received not a degree nor even many academic credits, but. rather, a hand-written letter in which he let his colleagues know that I could teach graduate-school level political theory. It is no accident that he periodically visited the University of Bologna, which, aside from hosting the huge project of publishing Leibniz's correspondence, was as the first university in Europe, founded in 1066. Back then, I bet letters of recommendation were the principal way in which scholars got hired; a scholar became recognized as one when the scholar he studied under realized that the budding scholar knew enough of the field, which is more than merely doing well in some classes. How technocratic and artificial contemporary universities would seem to ancient and medieval scholars. I think they would be startled at how many pedestrian scholars there are, who relish making narrow distinctions based on technicalities. In contrast, Patrick Riley a product of Harvard, where he continued to work and live even during the many years in which he took weekly flights during the semesters out to a Midwestern university, viewed European intellectual history in the great book tradition and was thus able to see intellectual inheritances well beyond Augustine's in Plato and Aquinas' in Aristotle. Riley traced how the theory of justice as love and benevolence came together from strands of thought in Plato and Augustine in the thought of Leibniz, and how the social contract school of political thought changed in going from Hobbes to Kant. Moreover, I admired Riley's relating of historical theological and moral thought to the political thought. How technocratic or pedestrian so many other twentieth-century scholars were, but not Patrick Riley. 

Riley was an extraordinarily kind man, an excellent scholar, and admittedly a flawed man, which made him human like the rest of us, and a man who struggled with mental illness, which presented challenges for me. All this made for an idiosyncratic man even if his academic ideas were rather orthodox (i.e., he was a Leibnizian rather than a Nietzschean, though he and I had studied the German philologist and philosopher enough to agree that he was not an existentialist). Perhaps even more than the ideas in his classes, Patrick Riley left a greater imprint on me by having passed on to me historical uniquely-academic values and customs, which, although not generally esteemed in American society and modern universities, can nonetheless withstand encroaching usurpers at the university level, depending on the university and local environment. The arrangement that Riley made for my study with him was not only distinctly academic, but also reminiscent of the world of academia before the advent of the modern university. 

Because of the richness of Riley's knowledge and the quality of his idiosyncratic lectures (the first of which that I attended--a seminar on Kant and Leibniz--featured Riley's voice on a tape recorder, as he was out of town that day), I extended my studies past my formal education. My tutelage under Riley was what he and I made of it, as his chairman at the University of Wisconsin would never accept Patrick's request for a visiting student out of resentment or dislike of the senior professor. Riley and I made of my four years of study with him as close to formal as we could by using 1 credit-hours of independent study. I attended every lecture of every class he taught during the period, and even repeated one of his survey courses so I could finish all of the 12 or 14 books assigned and cement the basic knowledge. In addition, I was able to audit courses in the philosophy department thanks to Riley. My studies under him worked out so well because we both valued the pursuit of knowledge, perhaps too much to fully realize the sacrifices made. 

I approached Riley doing a year of research at the university's business school, which had been a great disappointment to me. I found that the professors were not really scholars. One even warned his seminar of doctoral students to alter survey results in case they would otherwise interfere with future consulting opportunities. The night before I left the school to study under Riley in political science, a tenured professor specializing in insurance advised me to be careful because only the faculty in history read books; faculties in the other departments read only professional journals. These business professors have really no clue about academia, I thought to myself. Wow! It was telling that the business school building looked like a bank. Its inhabitants were business practitioners training and being trained. 

I was already aware of the illegal political ploy that the business school's dean had used a decade earlier to lie to the university committee on tenure about the results of a business ethics professor's tenure vote in order to get rid of the ethicist, whose interview on public radio criticizing the bank that had endowed a banking professorship, and thus the occupant thereof. The ethicist's lawyer discovered the alleged election fraud. I had known the ethicist during my doctoral studies, as we had both been in the same department, and he was still living in Madison when I was there. So on one cloudy morning outside the administration building sitting atop Baskin Hill from which the Wisconsin Capitol can be seen, I asked the university's chancellor about the fraud, and he replied, that the ethicist had been "a problem," as if that justified the unethical (and illegal) conduct. As a business ethicist myself, I felt the business school to be a chilly place even a decade after the fiasco.

Even so, I was taken back when I sat in on a doctoral strategy seminar one day. the professor actually urged his students to check with the respective managements of companies before publishing empirical research articles so to not to inadvertently cut off the opportunity for a consulting role. This occurred years before the financial crisis of 2008. That other managements, including those of investment banks, might rely on published "knowledge," presuming it to be unadulterated rather than warped, was apparently of no concern to the professor (who would go on to become a full professor!). I thought of this in the midst of the crisis because a hedge-fund company in Connecticut had relied on a flawed academic metric for assessing risk. Perhaps the metric had been "adjusted" to understate systemic risk so managers at financial companies would feel comfortable taking on more risk. 

It was from the sordid, moneyed interest of the University of Wisconsin's business school that I ventured out after the one-year appointment and found Patrick Riley in the political science department. I initially approached him because of his early work on federalism. While at Yale, I had wanted to study not just historical theology, Christian ethics, and philosophy of religion, but also history, constitutional law, and film studies. Regarding law and history, I had spent considerable effort studying the federal systems of the E.U. and U.S.; I had even stayed at Yale two years past my graduation to audit constitutional law courses and learn by teaching (as a teaching assistant) in the renowned history department (one course being on the history of European integration since 1950). It was amazing to be affiliated with History and Law when both were ranked number one, at the very least in the United States. I would learn only years later that philosophy of religion was tied for number one with Princeton. But I still wonder whether the sacrifices I made to extend my studies so far beyond my doctoral studies were worth the value of my Yale education. 

Even so, in approaching Riley at Wisconsin, I leapt at the opportunity to add real intellectual depth to my previous studies on federalism at Yale. I was impressed that the governance system had been able to hold such antithetical political cultures as those of Arizona and Massachusetts within a more general political system. To me, the benefits stitched into a federal system's very design outweighed the fact that bad laws such as slavery could be perpetuated without the anti-slavery states being able to stop the practice. 

Riley demurred on even discussing the topic of federalism. I was admittedly disappointed even though I could understand why. Sadly, he was still disgusted by the overly self-confident German professor at Harvard, Carl Friedrich, who had been the federalism expert on Patrick's dissertation committee. Furthermore, Riley's mind had traveled quite a distance from his dissertation on the history of thought on federalism, so he instead kindly invited me to study social contract and justice theories under him. I was honored by his welcoming demeanor; I had experienced no such attitude at the business school. 

I followed Patrick's advice to take two years of French, German, and Latin as a test-taking auditor approved by the relevant departments and audit seminars on Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, and historical ethical theory in the philosophy department. Patrick generously arranged all of that. In the spirit of jest, he did not appreciate my desire to learn German so I could read Nietzsche in the original. In fact, so ensconced in the historical ethical edifice was Riley that he refused to give his final lecture at UW on the radical German philosopher. Leibniz and Kant were Riley's favorites. As idiosyncratic as Patrick was, his thought was purely orthodox.

Others have written on Riley's scholarly accomplishments, so I need not get into those. Instead, I would like to add what Patrick himself told me of his approach and values. We had a conversation about his emphasis on relating theorists to each other ideationally, and, moreover, focusing on the thought of other scholars rather than coming out with his own theory. He demonstrated the value of having one’s own thought being on that of others (i.e., who had original theories), on how they relate to each other, and in interpreting not only their thought, but also how both similar and different ideas (of others) relate. I had asked him why he hadn’t come out with a new theory. Kant’s Kingdom of Ends and Leibniz’s wise human love (caritas sapientis) as universal benevolence (within what is reasonable, or wise) were well worth introducing (and living out) in Riley’s day and in sync with one of Riley’s own doctoral professors, John Rawls, whose ethical theory emphasizes people who are worst off in organizational, governmental, or societal systems. In academic terms and I suspect in his personal life as well, Riley sympathized with the individual up against obstacles, whether internal or external. 

Only in writing now do I see a thread through Riley's early and later work. Specifically, Patrick ended his dissertation with a second reference to the American Confederacy. I contend that the American Confederacy, and especially its stain of slavery, was clearly on Riley’s mind as he wrote his dissertation. In fact, Patrick may have selected historical theories of federalism as his topic because greater knowledge off it could stave off sordid applications in the future or in order to give a fuller account of why the American confederation came to be. The message, in other words, is perhaps that the history of federalism in theory at least contains a weakness. Riley's disapprobation of the Confederate States of America (1861-1865) may result from the high value he placed on Kant's Kingdom of Ends—treating other rational beings not only as means but also as ends in themselves—and Leibniz’s wise, upward-directed love as universal benevolence to other rational beings (i.e., all human beings).

I initially said to Patrick after one of his lectures, “I don’t see how justice can be founded on love.” I believed that love is above justice because the dominant justice notion had long since shifted to public legal justice. Justice as love and benevolence had long since gone extinct. Riley wanted to resurrect it. Instead of taking a pound of flesh, dispensers of justice could base it on love used wisely as universal benevolence. In the space of a few years, I had a much broader and deeper knowledge of justice itself. I already had a doctorate whose fields included business and religious ethics as well as (international) political-economic theory. My studies with Patrick provided theoretical depth not only to these fields, but also widened my prior theological studies at Yale include understanding how Kant’s Kingdom of Ends and Leibniz's justice as universal benevolence relate to Jesus’ notion of neighbor-love. Paul's dismissiveness toward the wisdom of Athens, I realized, is premised on a false dichotomy.

As for the administrators in UW's governance hierarchy, I contend that both the Kingdom of Ends and wise justice were recessive. Patrick and I had to arrange my informal study ourselves because he had to contend his department chair, who would not allow him to set up a formal visiting scholar arrangement for me out of spite for Patrick. We tried to do so in the history department, but its chairman was corrupt. In a French class, I told a student that I was researching comparative federalism by comparing the E.U. and U.S.; the instructor, a young French graduate student, was offended at the comparison so she lied to her professor that I had insulted her to the point that she was crying. The chairman of the history department would barely listen to my disavowal of the fiction. A year or so later, someone from a legislative office at the statehouse admitted that it was an open secret there that UW as "run like the mob."  That is, organized crime. 

I was often frustrated in dealing with Riley outside of class because he would often evade academic conversations unless they were conducted in a classroom. An undergraduate student told me that Professor Riley was most comfortable around impressionable young students, and that I should not take his anxiety personally. Admittedly, Patrick's excuses could be quite entertaining. The most so was his tactic of suddenly running down the hallway from his office in North Hall, as if he were Euthyphro suddenly remembering that he has an appointment just as Socrates has torn apart Euthyphro’s notion of piety. “You are a rascal!” Socrates finally says. 

To be sure, Patrick was not on solid ground at Wisconsin. University administrators had it out for him. One told me that Riley had unethically added his son’s hotel expenses to his own from an academic conference. That university-level administrator advised me not to study ethics with Riley. “He’s not the one I would learn ethics from.” Riley subsequently told me as he sat in his darkened office and I stood just outside the doorway that the additional receipts had been an oversight on his part. He sounded sincere, but I can only remain agnostic, not knowing for sure. It is possible that Riley created the legal fiction to help his son, but it is also possible that the university's administration did not take his word out due to the climate of distrust.

My own attitude toward that university’s administration had already soured not only from what I knew of the business school, but also when the director of the Memorial Union and Union South ignored two student referendums in which the vote went against a new bond issue to be paid by students to renovate Memorial Union and rebuild Union South from the ground up. The third time, the voting was made so difficult that the students who used the unions were, I suspect, of a higher proportion of the actual voters. Shady! As a 1-credit-hour special student, I joined the opposition's efforts in "chalking the pavements," which was commonly done on that campus. We were so good at it that one of the administration's student-sycophants complained and I then discovered something I had chalked on the front page of one of the newspapers. Shady! 

When Patrick showed me a story on the front page of the local paper in which his department chair makes fun of Riley, my estimation of the university’s dominant hierarchy lowered even more. The chair had unloaded on Riley to a journalist, who in turn published that the full professor was a problem because the antiquarian did not use email. Further, Patrick’s participation in the department was too limited because he "takes his carriage back to Cambridge" every weekend. Ouch! What sort of participation occurs on weekends? Whether out of ressentiment or a grudge held much too long, the chairman had gone too far. He had eschewed academic courtesy as if it were a stained, short-sleeved, and button-down white shirt.

Shortly after the story's publication, Patrick sat on a table in the small room of his social-contract seminar, looked at me in hurt astonishment, and said, "My own chair did that to me." I saw the man behind the scholar—a man who perhaps did not understand how a rational being could act so opposed to Kant’s Kingdom and Leibniz’s wise love. Instinctively, brewed perhaps from Leibniz’s caritas sapientis seu benevolentia universalis, I readily provided emotional support by replying, "The problem is him, not you. As I see it, your feelings make sense. I would be hurt too." I supported Patrick in his wavering decision to go to the chancellor on the matter. Neither of us thought it would make any difference, as the hierarchy was very corrupt, but we both thought he should do it on principle, based on the illusion perhaps that accountability exists even in dysfunctional organizations.

I had a good idea by then why Patrick had moved from Madison back to Cambridge twenty years earlier (after his sons graduated from High School) and continued to maintain a relationship with Harvard even as he commuted by air weekly to his day job in the Midwest. I was not surprised at all in 2007 when Patrick retired from Wisconsin as soon as he could at the age of 65 and decamped to Harvard, where he would teach and write until his death in 2015. Sometimes when I wore my Yale sweatshirt to one of Patrick's large survey classes at UW (I didn't own any UW clothing), he would teasingly bring up the matter of the rivalry between the two Ivy-League schools. In actuality, we were on the same side.

Fortunately, at Harvard, like Yale, academic custom was (and presumably still is) valued enough to accommodate at least an appreciation of the uniquely academic customs that don’t necessarily fit in a business or bureaucratic thicket. Riley in turn doubtlessly respected Harvard more than the University of Wisconsin, even given the great difference of academic quality. Interestingly, this thought occurred to me when just today I saw a picture of Patrick teaching in retirement at Harvard; whereas at Wisconsin his longish white hair had been disheveled (in a mad-scientist way), at Harvard his hair was styled. Respect goes both ways.

Regarding the value Patrick Riley placed on academic quality, respect for distinctly norms and values, and disdain when exogenous norms or values presume superiority in academic institutions, the imprint that Riley left on me was indeed a valuable gift. As a scholar, I would say to Patrick today, "I have decided to be what you made me." He would of course think of Rousseau’s Emile. "But where in that is there a will, a choice?" Patrick would ask. "Perhaps the word decided here really means realized, so I have realized that I am what you made me as a scholar." Riley resisted my efforts to resolve a good paradox, so he would no doubt reject my attempt here. Trying again, I might suggest that mature wills have some discretion to choose whether to carry on as they were made or select to be otherwise based on a myriad of influences that pile up as a person ages. The paradox would still exist for a young person such as Emile, having been taught so recently by Lycurgus. 

As Patrick and I used to compare the study of others' thoughts to coming up with a new theory (which are not mutually exclusive but can differ in emphasis), I would be inclined to add that a mature will, along with a unique perspective not dependent on the dominant assumptions in a field of knowledge, can result in new theory. Nietzsche explicitly warns his followers to strike out on their own rather than continually interpret Nietzsche’s own philosophy. Nietzsche also claims that no philosopher is a person of his or her own day. Even though Riley remained a faithful exponent of Leibniz, Rousseau, and Kant, the quirky twentieth-century scholar raised on Sunset Blvd in Hollywood was not a man of his day. Indeed, that a kid raised in such a decadent neighborhood came to love classical music and historical ethical and political thought seems to dispel the inevitability of Emile's declaration. At some point, Riley's mature will likely realized its ability to choose and then could proudly exclaim on Sunset Blvd, "I have decided to be other than you made me!" By that time, Riley would have had access to an alternative education of the formal sort.

A commercialized pseudo-corporate business school, such as the one at Wisconsin, would be hard-pressed to recognize the value of a course of academic study that was not formalized into an academic degree, which in turn could be monetized vocationally. The contemporary university of the time, moreover, would be hard-pressed. In the first few decades of the twenty-first century, students would find that they could earn a doctorate "on-line," meaning through a computer. While I was studying under Riley, I taught an online course at Walden University A doctoral student who was taking my masters course in leadership of all things unacademic, demanded to know why I was requiring students to have a thesis statement in their term papers. He wanted to know why only I had the requirement only after I had to tell him what a thesis statement is! He was about to turn to his dissertation, having completed his coursework. I felt bad for the guy, for he had lacked an academic relationship with a senior scholar who would have been able to flag the student even though the coursework requirements had been met. My letter from Patrick Riley means a lot to me because it goes beyond what even good grades course by course could say. I am a scholar in the old sense of the word, something that is not recognized by or even recognizable to administrators or even many "scholars" from the twentieth century on. 

Ideological Word Games: The Modern Weapon of Choice?

When I was young, my dad would sometimes criticize me for engaging in “word games.” Perhaps I was already parsing words; my parents and maternal grandfather were all lawyers. My last name is Worden, after all. I was raised to pronounce the name, war-den, and only after decades did it occur to me that people might spell the name as Worden rather than Warden if I pronounced it as word-n. I was the first even in the extended family to use the alternative; as Nietzsche wrote, no philosopher is a man of his time. We tend to think outside the proverbial constrained “box” because we critique assumptions and arguments (i.e., critical thinking), including those of the “boxes” that society leaves unquestionably standing as part of the status quo—the tyranny of which has repelled philosophers wetted to the idea that no stone should be left unturned, even if a society deems some stones as sacrosanct. It can be dangerous even to question the solidity of those stones, especially if they formed out of ideological controversies wherein tussling instinctual urges contesting for societal dominance. In this too, I am drawing on Nietzsche, who even viewed the content of ideas as being instinctual urges. In being willing to subject societally cherished ideas to fundamentally unique and deep scrutiny, Friedrich Nietzsche is the last, at least as of my time living in an American desert, both academically and geographically, where plenty of Nietzsche’s “herd animals” freely roamed. They were particularly vulnerable to ideological word-games in unquestioningly accepting the words from the insurgent ideologies as valid.

For example, the mindless expression used by retail employees, “Have a good one!” had become ubiquitous by 2020 in America even though no antecedent is mentioned for the pronoun, one. “Have a good what?” I would sometimes answer. The response would be even worse, such as “Whatever you want!” so I vanquished that experiment with truth. Why had “Have a good day!” or “Thanks for shopping here” succumbed to a vacuous “one”? To be sure, the grammatical error was more of an indication that business schools, like law and medical schools, should accept students for their respective first degrees after those students have earned a first degree in another school, such as that of the liberal arts and sciences, so the basics are not truncated. Certainly no passive aggression is involved in the ungrammatical expression.

Such aggression, I submit, underlies some cases of word games wherein ideological advocates insist that their respective instinctual urges, which include dominance, be accepted by adopting a questionable word-change even though it renders comparisons highly (yet invisibly!) unfair. Not by accident, the linguistic “game board” is tilted. People who do not play along with the change, perhaps because they can sniff the obvious yet hushed ideological game, can unfairly be subject to presumptuous pressure to use the new word appropriately. In short, the assertion, “That word [or comparison] is [now] inappropriate” can be used as a weapon.

For example, by 2020 the words male and female had come to be regularly extended from animals to human beings. So whereas formerly a person might ask, “Is your dog a female?” it had become proper to ask, for example, “Was the driver a female?”  The same applied to the word, male. Initially, I would answer such a derogatory question with, “You mean was the driver a woman?” In answering my question affirmatively, the person, whether a man or woman, would tacitly acknowledge that the use of the word female was based on a conformist ideology. Feminists could have used implicit comparisons, such as in the statement, “Was the driver a male or a woman?” and anti-feminists could have resorted to, “Was the driver a man or a female?” I had not heard such comparisons being made, but just in reading the two questions I can detect passive aggression. Indeed, that would likely be the purpose behind the respective wordings.

Racial hatred could also manifest through comparisons. On February 12, 2020, President Lincoln’s birthday ironically, a political reporter on National Public Radio discussing the previous day’s 2020 New Hampshire presidential primary said that the state is “mostly white so African Americans had not yet had the chance to be heard.” Then the reporter referred to Iowa and New Hampshire as “lily white.” This expression points to a racial bias, at least in regard to areas in which mostly Caucasians live. In using the actual name of the race, Caucasian, I am trying to correct for the convenient category mistake in the reporter’s comparison of whites with African Americans.” The latter term is an ethnic rather than a racial term. A Caucasian man from South Africa who has moved to American is an African American. That this term was invented by Jesse Jackson, a civil rights activist, is a hint as to the ideological impetus behind the ideologically-driven intension behind the switch from “Black,” a racial term, to “African American,” an ethnic immigrant term. The force of the ideology is responsible for the category mistake. On two occasions, I made statements in which the axis of comparison is skewed in the other direction. One interesting example is, “Caucasians and Blacks can get along.” Even in spite of the friendly idea, my acquaintance scolded me. “Don’t use Caucasian.” Yet if I had used “whites” instead, as in “Whites and Blacks can get along”—a statement that Martin Luther King likely said many times—a Caucasian with a certain ideological bias would likely have corrected me, insisting that I use “African American” rather than “Black” even though the former is not a term that refers to a race! Passive aggression fueled by an insurgent ideology can all too willingly rip through reasoning. Nietzsche would say that such reasoning is itself a tussle of instinctual urges, the most dominant in this case being one that clashes with the urge behind the ideology.

I submit that many people take words and linguistic comparisons at face level only. The real uses, at the ideological (and even instinctual urge) level, are frequently overlooked. The operative assumption is that in the selection of words, even in comparison to others, speakers and writers are ideologically neutral. The encroaching natural tendency of an ideology (and the instinctual urges behind it) is not recognized in its fullness. I submit that both the overlooking and the selection can be done unconsciously, though conscious intent in the selection can also exist. The person who feels a little uncomfortable but cannot identify why after hearing, “Was the driver a man or a female?” or “Was the driver Caucasian or Black?”---or even worse, “Was the driver a Caucasian woman or a Black male?”—unconsciously senses the ideological bias, especially if the listener’s ideology, and thus dominant urges, are at odds with the bias. The listener who knows that the comparisons are insulting or otherwise diminutive to one gender or one race also knows that passive aggression was involved. Sadly, the human “race” can be too creative and subtle in turning something into a weapon. At the very least, making specific instances of linguistic weapons transparent to other people can be done such that those instances may lose their fangs in the antiseptic of sunlight. 

So You Want to Become an Excellent Writer

A good writer writes well. This truism maintains that a good writer is has mastered the craft of writing. Unfortunately, this feat does not come without considerable effort, for takes some good old-fashioned study in grammar and spelling. Unfortunately, the linguistic mechanics furnish only the means of entry, though this point seems to be lost on the American English teachers who slighted grammar pedagogically in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. Perhaps the novelists who have felt immune from being grammatical for the sake of style have been the interlarded culprits behind the trend of grammar be viewed as relative or an elective. To be sure, style has right of exception, but the problem is when the exceptions become the norm and even an excuse for bad grammar. This is all just foundational stuff; the quality distinguishing the excellent writer from even a good one is passion-fueled insight. The writer who writes out of a strong urge, or instinct, to express an insight publicly naturally finds his or her own voice, and thus identity, as a writer.  In this sense, a writer is like an entrepreneur whose passion breaks through the confines of an organizational structure like lava pushes through the tough shell of a lava dome.

As an entrepreneur, Richard Branson founded the Virgin Group, which went on to include more than 300 companies in the second quarter of 2011. Ordinarily, the reality of running a cumbersome corporation saps entrepreneurial talent, which enables managerial creatures to swoop in and take the reins of power from the founder. In the case of Branson, however, having a large company did not prevent him from taking on new commercial ventures that reflected his dreams in a way that solidified rather than weakened his control. "I'm just ridiculously lucky," he said, "and [I] just love to live my dreams." True to form, he pioneered Virgin Galactic into space and Virgin Oceanic into the deep sea, utilizing the wealth of a large corporation to do so. 

The key to Branson’s business success was his strong passion for exploration. "The interesting thing about exploration is . . . you never quite know what you're going to discover," he said. A discovery is often a significant find, even one that is of a hitherto unknown paradigm. For example, commercial flights into orbit or even the moon would change the meaning of flights. The uncertainty alone of such a paradigm-changer could easily be choked by organizational managers reflecting the caution that has been innate in most corporate cultures. 
Similarly, editors at publishing houses can act as conservative hedges against a novel idea reaching an audience and hopefully society itself. Like Branson, an excellent writer merges the strong motive of a passion with something new enough to matter. Accordingly, Branson’s advice on choosing a profession has bearing on writers: "don't try to start a business because you think you can make money. Start a business because you really want to."
Similarly, the excellent writer utilizes the mechanics of writing to express an underlying passion rather than merely to write for its own sake or to make money. Such a writer is likely to deliver a unique and interesting perspective that is a real contribution because passion tends to go further in the sense of uncovering. Passion-fueled insight can be revolutionary, and thus be a provocation to the interests vested in the status quo. 
In terms of writing, revolutionary ideas such as those of the European philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the nineteenth century can simply be ignored until long after the writer’s death. No philosopher is a man of his times, Nietzsche wrote. No paradigm-wrestling philosopher that is; plenty of pedestrian philosophers fit perfectly well in the society of their day. Such philosophers tend to study minutia and fit in cubby-holes at universities. To question the assumptions of the operating paradigm of the day and even present alternatives is the mission of a learned philosopher whose learning has enabled him or her to escape the usual orbits. Unitary explorers who have a passion for their respective unique ideas, which are of tremendous value, are not only those philosophers, but great writers more generally who have something very significant to present to the world.