 Good day, May 40 here. So James Burnham is the author of The Mackie of Ellions, The Decline of the West, read a book on the managerial state, and his son reported a piece of life advice that James Burnham wasn't dispensed. It was assumed that everybody knows everything, and the reason for this advice, so grabbing my attention, is that as a preacher's kid, I learned to code-switch very early. I was the easiest of the three kids to raise, and then, of course, my parents were probably the most pain, and I learned to code-switch, meaning that when I was at home, I would find myself to the mores of my parents, but then, since I left the house, I would say and do what I wanted to do, and so this necessitated leading a double life. I had one life outside where I was having three, and another life where I just didn't want to rock the boat at home, and I've enjoyed the excitement of leading a double life on and off for years, like having one identity in church or one identity in synagogue, one identity at work, one identity with some friends, different identity with other friends. It would have been a big mixer, usually, for all my friends from the different components of my life. I haven't had a tremendous eagerness to bring them together, and some people have said that the multiple lies I've led raise schizophrenia to terrifying proportions, and so I recognize the profound truth of people like me in that James Burnham remark. I just assume that everybody knows everything. If you have that attitude, everybody knows everything, then this is one of the biggest Persian synagogues in Los Angeles. If you assume that everybody knows everything, you're not going to try to get away with stuff like all my life, and try to get away with stuff. I've got energy and thrills and excitement for trying to get away with stuff, but I'm almost 58 years of age, and I'm kind of tired of living a double life and trying to get away with stuff. Now I just want to be a solid citizen, and the last few years I've increasingly approximated some degree of operating as everybody knows everything. In other words, the opposite of trying to get away with things, trying to hide things, trying to lead multiple lives. So I have friends who have a polite exterior, and then they can be quite raunchy and edgy online. They have an e-personality, and then they have their sober, compliant, respectable personality for the real world. But the two keep bleeding into each other, particularly the e-personality and the toxic edgy habits developed from e-personality bleed into their real life, and get them fired, get them isolated, lose friends, lose standing, lose income. A lot of bad things happen when you get most of your energy and enthusiasm and joy in life from your e-personality. I love this view. I love the palm trees, and so particularly conservatives feel constrained, because the accusation of racism is just a death knell, and so people on the right feel constrained from sharing their views much more than people on the left. They feel like the system, the game, the institutions are arrayed against them, and so they may see their edgy comments for online, and they particularly feel the outrage industry, which is dominantly on the right, and through online anonymity, and they can live out their second life, where there's a tremendous excitement. So talking to a friend of mine who is a total edgelord in private with people he treats for us, and in various internet personality profiles, I'm a total edgelord, but in real life he has to be very respectable, and he has to be able to pull off a good working relationship with the dominant center-left strand of Jewish life. But these arrangements can very easily come crashing down, and it's come crashing down for him at various times, where his more edgy side gets exposed, and it feeds back into the polite side. So for most people, I think they're better off operating, acting, living as though everybody has everything. And for many of my edgelord friends, they find that boring, right? If you don't have kids, you're very likely, and you're a man, you have a tremendous need for excitement, right? Men who are married with kids, they don't seem to have this need for excitement, but I know that a single man out there chasing excitement, and often they find it online, where they find, you know, a community of people with a similar edgelord personality and orientation, and when you present to a single guy, a bachelor, this idea, operate as though everybody knows everything, his reaction is going to be, that sounds boring. I love my double and triple lies of being a double agent operating behind enemy lines. It's just much more exciting. But this pursuit of excitement, right? I certainly feel it, understand it, but it's not usually conducive to a happy, successful life. It usually leads to isolation, that choices, loss of income, loss of prosperity, loss of social prospects, loss of community, and loss of opportunities to move out of the bachelor status to get married and have kids. Then I presented this idea to another Jewish friend, and he said, well, I like it. That is how a Jew should operate with his fellow Jews, but not with the Goyim. With his fellow Jews it should be open and free, and let them know the score, talk about what's really going on, be open about the quality of his goods, but we can't be that way with the Goyim. That's a dark humor that reminds me of the darkness of Cormac McCarthy novels, right? I'm listening to the audible version of Child of God, one of Cormac McCarthy's early novels, and my God, I can't even describe it, comes across a young couple in a car who are no longer living, and he takes out everything that he's ever wanted to communicate to a woman on this one particular female corpse, and this is in a Cormac McCarthy novel called Child of God, right? This itinerant wanderer, when I glanced at the plot description in Wikipedia called him a serial killer, though I haven't gotten to that part yet. My God, I did date one woman and said, I take out all your frustrations with women, take them out on me in bed. That's why it's good to be unified, right? I used to have this tremendous fear of the different elements of my life coming together, such as at the party for my books, the book party put on by the Los Angeles Press Club in 2004, my memoir Rebel About a Shure, and my book on Hollywood that produces profiles and frustration, and the various segments of my life were there largely separated. There was the dominantly secular journalist crowd, there were my Orthodox Jewish friends, and there were the various people I knew from the Hollywood and from the porn industry, and like these four different, largely separate crowds. So, I mean, communists had great success infiltrating our institutions and infiltrating our government. So, for the extraordinary person who can make an extraordinary difference by leading a double life, then if they can achieve extraordinary results, then that's good for our cause. If they're doing the right thing, making society the world, the nation a better place, then yeah, I guess there's a strong case for the extraordinary to take on a double life. But for most people, they're much better on leading a unified life, and it's bracing, and it's not exciting. But a lot of subtle benefits just kind of build over time, so if you think of your good deeds getting in front of you as your ambassadors, it's more effective if you're leading one unified life, rather than just trying to get away with stuff running across the street. If you've got a split life and you do some good deeds in one side of your life, the rest of your life will benefit. If you have a unified life and you're building towards something, then different components of your life can work together. I remember I think it was Daniel Lappin who wrote about this in one of his books on Judeo-Christian America, so that if you can't tell people what you do for living, it'll be tremendously handicapped, because ideally you want to let a wide variety of people know what you do off of your services, and that way you can build off your community, off your network, off your connections. If you're too ashamed to let people know what you really do for a living, then it's hard to build financial prosperity and social prestige and social prosperity. One aphorism is you can tell the character of somebody by what they do for a living.