Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the dangers of excessive adoration and self-denial, comparing it to a totalitarian regime.
Christopher Hitchens uses this provocative analogy to highlight the absurdity and danger of a culture that values endless praise and self-abnegation, suggesting that such attitudes can lead to a loss of individual identity and freedom, akin to living under a totalitarian state. By equating this mindset to a 'celestial North Korea', he implies that such ideologies, while seemingly benign or even noble, can be deeply oppressive and stifling.
In practice
In a discussion about the dangers of authoritarianism, one might quote Hitchens to illustrate the risks of absolute devotion to an ideology.
In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.
[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head - chemo-brain they call it. It's awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.
Let me tell you something: for hundreds of thousands of years, this kind of discussion would have been impossible to have, or those like us would have been having it at the risk of our lives. Religion now comes to us in this smiley-face, ingratiating way β because itβs had to give so much more ground and because we know so much more. But youβve got no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong, and when it really did believe that it had God on its side.
Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.
Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.
Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?
Hal, if I tell thee a lie, spit in my face, call me horse.
I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.
Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical, or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.