THE OLD OLIGARCH WILL LOVE THIS: “I’m tangentially reminded of what a friend in Santa Barbara would say when he ran into really hard-core relativist types. Eric was very much into the intellectual end of neo-paganism, so this wasn’t an infrequent sort of encounter. When someone started going on about how everyone construct their own subjective religious experience, Eric would get todally deadpan and say, ‘I’m glad that works for you.’ When asked what he meant, he’d explain that in his practice, he encountered universal and objective forces, so he couldn’t adopt the other person’s relativism, but he was happy that they’d found a practice that worked for them. Very very often this led to huffy assertions about he was wrong, at which he’d affect great umbrage and say something like ‘Are you trying to force me into your views? Have you no respect for my individuality and personal quest?’ I saw this a few times in Santa Barbara’s good used bookstores, and always loved it.”

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