Journal of a Dissenter: On History, Philosophy, and Psychology 1996-2025

Here's the short preface that introduces the document:

A journal from the age of 15 to one’s 40s is bound to be, in places, pretty embarrassing, and unintentionally very funny. I used to think my journal would be of interest to future readers—wanted it to be “the most intellectually rich document in history”—and years ago even wrote a table of contents for it. My grandiose hope was that I might help preserve certain aspects of our culture’s heritage from the global conflagration that I was sure is coming, by bringing them together into one document that could be read, perhaps, eventually, by those who survived the catastrophes. I also thought it might be worthwhile to record one individual’s lifelong attempt to grapple with perennial questions. –But life cures one of youthful self-importance. Maybe someone will at least find interesting passages.

It might seem like shameless exhibitionism to make a document like this public, but I’ve deleted a lot of personal stuff and changed names. (I’ve kept some personal passages, however, because they depict common experiences and youthful psychological tendencies.) There’s little reason for anyone to care about the author. What might be of interest, rather, are the general truths—about society, history, humanity—that, hopefully, the journal expresses.

The perspectives on subjects of intellectual substance are surprisingly consistent over nearly two million words. On social questions, the point of view is almost always Marxian. On the nature of the human mind, the perspective is rationalist, or innatist, nativist, semi-Kantian, Chomskian. On “the human condition,” there is a fair amount of existentialist alienation, albeit tempered by themes from the Enlightenment and Marxism. On gender roles and relations between the sexes, a polemic against doctrinaire social constructionism and radical feminism runs through the whole document. On “value theory,” the point of view is pretty consistently in the skeptical and empiricist spirit of David Hume, J. L. Mackie, and the “sentimentalist” thinkers of the Enlightenment. On consciousness and the self, the journal continually returns to methods and themes from phenomenology and even Buddhism. On academic and mainstream intellectual culture, the viewpoint is highly critical, not very different from the attitudes of Marx and Chomsky.

Since I still agree with all these (and other) positions, I’d say that one useful thing about the document is that, in a world of stunning irrationality and unintelligence, it lays out a rational and comprehensive worldview. But underlying it all is a simple intellectual and moral attitude: an anti-institutional humanism, a rejection of the specialized, bureaucratized, ‘professionalized’ way of doing things. Truth and humanity are not to be found in values exemplified by intellectual, cultural, political, and economic elites.