Reading

I'm reading an excellent book called THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND by Allen Bloom. It is about college education in America, but like all great books, about much much more. It feels as if was written today, but was actually penned in 1984. Here is one great passage about psychology in American life:

Once Americans had become convinced that there is indeed a basement to which psychiatrists have the key, their orientation became that of the self, the mysterious, free, unlimited center of our being. All of our beliefs issue from it and have no other validation. Although nihilism and its accompanying existential despair are hardly anything but a pose for Americans, as the language derived from nihilism has become a part of their educations and insinuated itself into their daily lives, they pursue happiness in ways determined by that language. There is a whole arsenal of terms for talking about nothing - caring, self-fulfillment, expanding consciousness, and so on, almost indefinitely. Nothing determinate, nothing that has a referent, as we saw in Allen and Riesman. There is a straining to say something, a search for an inwardness that one knows one has, but it is still a cause without an effect. The inner seems to have relation to the outer. The outer is dissolved and becomes formless in the light of the inner, and the inner is will-o'-the-wisp, or pure emptiness. No wonder the mere sound of Existentialists' Nothing or the Hegelians' Negation has an appeal to contemporary ears. American nihilism is a mood, a mood of moodiness, a vague disquiet. It is nihilism without the abyss.

Well, at the very least it explains Kobe Bryant and the movies of Sophia Coppola.