As Frédéric Bastiat put it, the government is “the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” It is a fiction in that it rests on the lie that one group within society operates outside of the basic ethical norms that the rest of us must abide by. That shared delusion, and the vacuum or absence of justified resistance it brings, is a source of enormous power. It allows those who wield it to simply take wealth from those who already created it. There’s no need to struggle to create it themselves.

It’s a good deal. But to maintain that power, state officials need to share it, or at least share some of the coercively-seized profits gleaned from it, with whoever they need to help keep the delusion that this setup is good and just alive. Or, at least, that resistance is just not worth it.

That basic formula is how states work; and it is how they have always worked. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking at the absolutist regimes in eighteenth-century Europe, the USSR at the height of Stalin’s rule, or the modern US. The narratives, rituals, and “scientific” arguments evolve into whatever form is necessary to keep enough of the population convinced. But the result is always the same: a small group of officials and well-connected courtiers and plutocrats use state power to enrich and empower themselves and their close friends and allies. State power is used to redistribute wealth from the broader population to whichever groups are organized and connected enough to steer it in their own favor.

Connor O'keeffe, 08 Jul 2026, from the article “Is This Country Having Its Socialist Moment?”

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[The second-order illiterate] has come a long way: his loss of memory causes him no suffering; his lack of will makes life easy for him; he values his inability to concentrate; he considers it an advantage that he neither knows nor understands what is happening to him. He is mobile. He is adaptive. He has a talent for getting things done. We need have no worries about him. It contributes to the second-order illiterate’s sense of well-being that he has no idea that he is a second-order illiterate. He considers himself well-informed; he can decipher instructions on appliances and tools; he can decode pictograms and checks. And he moves within an environment hermetically sealed against anything that might infect his consciousness. That he might come to grief in this environment is unthinkable. After all, it produced and educated him in order to guarantee its undisturbed continuation.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 01 Jun 2000, from the article “In Praise of Illiteracy”

Reading has always been associated with education and more generally with urban social elites. Although contemporary commentators deplore the decline of “the reading habit” or “literary reading,” historically the era of mass reading, which lasted from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century in northwestern Europe and North America, was the anomaly.

Griswold, McDonald and Wright, 2005, from the paper “Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century”

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I haven’t read much of this article from the Atlantic nor have I read the two other quotes about reading that precede this. I do intend to read the latter two pieces in full but I’m content with skimming the other. I was made privy to Hans Magnus Enzensberger through a lecture that I listened to by Michael Silverblatt, the host of Bookworm. The other quote comes from a reference found in Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows.

This Atlantic article, I don’t think it’s bad. Very long. My indifference towards reading it is because, well, I’ve heard some of it all before. It names the usual suspects. Ong, McLuhan, Postman.

I think it would have landed better to me…as a book. Would I read it? I’d try to get around to it… The other sources though, yes, there’s no excuse. Why not.

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What I’m reading

• “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction”, Adam Kelly, from Considering David Foster Wallace
• “The Historical Peculiarities of the Social and Economic Development of Russia”, Boris Brutzkus, from Class, Status, and Power: Social Stratification in Comparative Perspective
• I just completed “In Praise of Illiteracy”
• The first volume of Rehmatullaahi Wasiya by Mufti Sa’eed Ahmad Palanpuri, a commentary of Hujjatul-Allah al-Baligha by Shah Waliullah Dehlawi

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