New Year’s Resolution: No More Mind Pollution

A great many people will resolve again this year not to eat junk food or at the very least curb their intake. This is a materially healthy solution.

While I too should follow suit and ignore the midday siren call of the chips in the kitchen, this year — with a baby girl on the way — I am keen instead to pursue a mentally healthy solution.

In 2023, I will endeavor to cut down on the amount of mind pollution I consciously expose myself to in hopes that I can better liberate my thinking from the linguistic, philosophical, and social conventions that were once specific to the enemy, but that have since leached out subliminally into the greater culture and been massively adopted.

If we regularly absorb leftist content (i.e., on streaming services, in books, in the theater, or via video games) while neglecting the Western canon and nonmainstream works, then don’t we risk becoming Manchurian candidates? Unwitting assassins pitted against the very ideas and culture that we love?

In “The Abolition of Man,” C.S. Lewis emphasized the danger of the implicit logical positivism in a British interwar grammar textbook, which he regarded as a work of propaganda. Lewis reckoned that the thinking subtly baked into this contemporary English textbook would, as part of a broader campaign, result in hard hearts and soft heads. (Read more from “New Year’s Resolution: No More Mind Pollution” HERE)

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