team krony

the masked avenger meets his match

real-life villains

In the "real world," a villain does not dress all in black; he does not proclaim his villainy with his fashion or his mannerisms. Likewise, he is not motivated by one-dimensional drives to evil and cruelty. He does not crouch in a dark cave plotting the torment of innocents for its own sake. No, the real-life villain sees himself a hero; his actions are motivated in the righteousness of his own imaginings. He, no less because he is a villain, is a paragon of his own standards of virtue. The wise man says: our certainty of our own righteousness is no guarantee that we are free from villainy.

liviu librescu

Who should take action ~ who can take action? The common man believes that the government can act, and in his apathy, his laziness, his shirking of responsibility, he does not act in its stead. But there is no "government" - as individual, as force, as source of action - that can act, there is only the slow, emergent response of individuals. In the moment, when faced with crisis, no man can say how he will act. But if the response of individuals is to coalesce into a whole, then some individual must act. There are none who will come to our rescue, there is only us. To he who, when faced with the maelstrom, did act, when all around could only cower paralyzed in the hope that others would act, we owe not just respect, but also gratitude. It is from such exemplars that we can learn what real freedom is. It is from such exemplars that we can learn how to live.

a test

"They should have acted thus _______," we say, but would we ourselves have acted thusly? Only if tested can we know ~ and to be tested, at all costs, we avoid.