Alas, the last two volumes of this work are very tough going, not least because Voegelin felt the need to develop a specialized vocabulary all his own, using terms like “eristics,” “metaleptic consciousness,” “metastatic faith,” “pneumatic theophany,” and “egophanic history,” as if they were transparent.

Quartz: So, is it OK to punch a Nazi?

Žižek: No! If there is violence needed, I’m more for Gandhian, passive violence.

I once made a statement, maybe you know it, which cost me dearly. I said the problem with Hitler was that he wasn’t violent enough. Then I said, in the same statement, that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler.

There exists a “deifugal” force. Otherwise all would be God.

I glanced back at the poster, at the part of the mural where a man in a turban offered a throned demon two infants. The demon was pretty excited about this. Yes! Yes, he wanted the infants!

Von Neumann, Hobbes, and Mandeville portray a linearized parody of actual man, and this in the very small; the result is elaborated, by simple extrapolation, all in an idiot-savant child’s multi-dimensional parody of Euclidean space-time. There are no physical values, no physical realities in the virtual reality of Von Neumann’s universe. There is only a fantastic montage: the Cheshire cat’s grin of Jansci (“Johnny”) Von Neumann, as an imaginary child, and the ring of the candy-store cash register.

Bullied at school, but forbidden by his Quaker parents to fight back, he turned to philosophy as his weapon, dismissing his schoolyard persecutors as the “unwitting followers of David Hume.”

One child was described as “a Mear Skirlinton Covered with Rags with a hole in the Roofe of the Mouth,” while another was simply “The most miserable object Ever Received.”

Philosophy was rescued from the Humian dragon by a succession of St. Georges from Germany, clad in new dialectical armor – Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx – but not before Adam Smith, a friend and associate of Hume, already founded bourgeois economics on erroneous predialectical philosophical foundations.

I’ve got to tell you something real quick as I chug my Mountain Dew, because yes, I’m a memer. I’m not the alt-right, but I still drink Mountain Dew.

Relaxing into his holiday, Croker continued reading through the long list of dubious charges against the several thousand victims of the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris, from its institution on 10 March 1793 until the fall of Maximilien Robespierre on 27 July 1794.