November 2, 2025

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

Joan Didion (1934–2021), American writer, Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968), “On Morality”, Jay p.116

List three “rights” one or more of your constituents have claimed that have, in fact, no basis in reality. Did you need to tell them they were misinformed, or did you palm that task off on someone else, or did you just say nothing at all?

This shows itself in people’s claim that some right of theirs is being denied. Usually, there is no such right, only the belief in an entitlement as imagined by someone whose parents were incapable of ever saying no to them when they were children, and maybe even told them their poo-poo was chocolate. Then again, absenting the victory of the North in the American Civil War and the constitutional amendments that followed in its wake, slaves might still be yearning to breathe free, as they certainly had no right to be free, according to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857.