In Defense of Arrogance and Heroism

Heroic Masculinity, Narcissism, and Crabs in a Bucket

Note: the following article is a rant. The carefully-chosen words and balanced approach you’ve come to expect from this author are not in evidence. Profane language is front-and-center, and provocation is intended. You have been warned.

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Narcissism: It’s not just for Cluster-B head cases anymore

Anyone, it seems, can be a narcissist these days.¹

OnlyFans models are narcissists (in some special way that regular models presumably are not). Older men who date younger women are narcissists. Hell, even people who want to have children are narcissistic. People who want to work for themselves? They’re narcissists too.

For that matter, individualism is narcissistic. Heroism is narcissistic (and burdensome, besides).

People who think they’ve got the right to change the government? Yeah, definitely narcissists.

New media personalities? Narcissists.

People interested in IQ research? They’re lying about their own IQs (at least by implication); less than one percent of the population or less has an IQ over 140. Nobody you ever interact with is going to have that, and anyone who claims otherwise is lying to you. These people are obviously all narcissists, aren’t they?

And tech bros! Oh my god, tech bros! They are the worst narcissists of all. Who are they who think they’ve got the right to go around inventing things without regulation, selling things without approval, and, you know, doing shit that nobody else is doing? Who are they to take money for what they’ve built? To accumulate power and then use it? They think they’re the main characters! Them and politicians, man. They think they run the fucking world. Fuck them anyway.

Even people who write for Substack…well, really, they’ve gotta be narcissists too, don’t they? I mean, they’ve got the audacity to think that you might want to hear what they have to say.

So who are these assholes who think they’ve got the right to change things? Who think they’re so much better than the rest of us? This is a democracy, goddammit! We all get a vote, we all get a say, and those motherfuckers who think they’re better than the rest of us? They’re the problem.

And so are all the bastards talking about manly men, and trying to bring back heroic virtues. I mean, who do they think they are? Do they really think they’re gonna stop the fall of Rome? Do they really want to get things fixed? Nah. They’re just looking to see their names in lights.

Right?

Sorry to spoil the fun, but as someone who’s spent his entire public career taking the piss, tearing down people and ideas who (in my not-humble opinion) richly deserve it, and is violently opposed to tactics and institutions overseen by robot-brained jerk-offs, I’m about to give some of that piss back.

All this talk of narcissism, all the moral opprobrium directed at those who rise above their station, and all the seething, nasty, small-minded hatred that disguises itself as moralism? All the sudden popularity of anti-intellectualism and conceited armchair Napoleon complexes?

It’s bullshit.

And I’m gonna prove it, because it’s far past time for someone to fucking do so.

What Is a Narcissist?

Let’s start with the elephant in the room: genuine narcissism.

A narcissist is someone with such a fragile sense of self that they can’t maintain a viable self-picture without forcing others (usually by manipulation, bullying, or other underhanded means) to participate in their self-narrative.

And there are a lot of them around, because we have lived, for over a hundred years, in a civilization devoted to undermining the proper development of human identity (this is a deep enough subject that I have an entire book coming out on the issue later this year).

Narcissists are (I am not overstating the matter) emotional terrorists. Their entire world is consumed with filling the void at the center of their souls. They often seem confident, bellicose, impressive, and arrogant, but all of these things are essentially a pose. Even when the narcissist is legitimately well-accomplished, their insecurity is such that they find it impossible not to burnish their own credentials at every single opportunity—especially in situations where it’s socially inappropriate, or even costly to their legitimate social standing…at least if they are grandiose in their narcissism.

The grandiose narcissist eventually grows tiresome and is thus relatively easy to escape—their braggadocios nature eventually undercuts their charisma (if they have charisma), and they begin to look pretty damn pathetic as their boasts consistently fail to bear out in their actions and accomplishments.

The vulnerable narcissist, on the other hand, is very good at playing the victim card.

Whether such a character has a legitimate claim to victimhood or not, their self-aggrandizement strategy involves promoting their pain/disadvantage/etc. so that other people will be forced to make them the center of attention out of pity. When they don’t get the validation they’re seeking, they turn nasty, but they rarely have the dignity to seek revenge directly. They prefer to engage in reputation destruction, in complicated paranoid narratives that they spin to convince themselves that those who make them feel inadequate are fixated on them, and in other subtle and generally deniable nastiness.

Because narcissists are tragically common and difficult to deal with, and because it feels damn good to have a bucket to sweep people who annoy you into, calling anything that seems uppity “narcissistic” has become disgustingly common.

Which, of course, hurts both the victims of narcissists and damages the entire culture (thin though it is) around honor, achievement, dignity, and greatness.

Heroism

“What makes a man, Mister Lebowski…Is it being prepared to do the right thing, whatever the cost? Isn’t that what makes a man?”

“Sure. That and a pair of testicles.”
—The Big Lebowski

The Big Lebowski is one of the strangest films ever to become a cultural phenomenon. Less racy and transgressive than The Rocky Horror Picture Show, less disturbing than A Clockwork Orange or The Shining or anything directed by David Lynch or Ken Russel, it bombed on its release and then caught the public imagination on video.

Why?

The Big Lebowski is a satire on the work of Raymond Chandler, released to a world that barely remembered Chandler’s work. Chandler was a mousy, alcoholic, resentful little shit of a man whose brilliant ear for dialogue and irony took the developing Hard Boiled Detective genre and perfected it by turning it into a thinly veiled updating of the Chivalric Hero mythos. ²

His detective Philip Marlowe is a knight errant, a hard-assed man of integrity with a firm moral compass, awash in a nihilistic world of decadent wealth, gold-digging femme fatales, gay pornographers, lowbrow hustlers, and corrupt cops. Marlowe both loves and loathes the denizens of darkness he tussles with, and always wins through with his honor intact, at the cost of great alienation and a generally Phyrric nature to the victories. Marlowe’s world, it seems, not only has no room for heroes, but no place at all for good men of any sort. He is serving a life sentence in hell, with only his virtue to keep him company.

The Dude (Marlowe’s analogue in The Big Lebowski) shares Marlowe’s vices—his nihilism, curmudgeonliness, greed, lustiness, and alcoholism, but he is not heroic in any traditional sense. He has the chivalric impulse to save the lady in distress, but he’s not particularly motivated to do anything about it until he’s cornered into feeling personally responsible for her fate.

The Dude just wanted his rug back. IYKYK

But where Marlowe was surrounded by ruthlessly competent villains (and allies), The Dude lives in a world entirely populated by bumbling emasculated men (literally every man in the film) and the women who dominate them. His friends—all apparently basically decent guys with deep emotional problems—are united in their desperate desire to cling to their masculinity in a world where it does not fit. The Dude is a post-feminist Marlowe, wandering listlessly through the world that has no use whatsoever for men, beyond their utility as loan shark enforcers and sperm donors. The Dude’s heroism stems entirely from his willingness to say “Eh, fuck it,” and get on with living life on his own terms.

Little wonder, then, that the film he leads became a cult classic in the early 2000s, or that it has a bigger following and cachet nearly thirty years after its initial release than it ever has.

By the same token, Chandler’s re-invention of the hard boiled detective as a knight errant caught on because Chandler—himself a dour, sickly, and weak man whose early life was spent surrounded by emasculated, bureaucratic, and effeminate-but-power-hungry men—understood that the modern age was quickly approaching a point when everything that made men masculine was being systematically ground away by the machinery of industry and State.

So what makes a man? The Big Lebowski wasn’t far off.

Since long before feminism—even long before the fist stirrings of the currents that have risen to create our contemporary ennui—there was a single, inescapable core truth about men that defined (and continues to define) everything about our nature:

We are born worthless.

Women are born worthwhile—they create humans. Their ability to do so is scarce. The potential future generations that they are literally born carrying (a girl baby is born already possessing all of the ova she will ever produce) makes them utterly indispensable to the existence of the human species.³

Men, who create their gametes by the billions on-the-fly after they reach puberty, are a dime a dozen. The human race could continue indefinitely if the entire earth were populated by women, with the exception of a handful of men, and, at least genetically speaking, nobody would notice.⁴

Males are born disposable, and worthless, and we know it.

To be worth anything, we must become special.

This awareness of the difference in value between the sexes is so deep in our bones that it shows up in early childhood. From the time they can walk on their own, boys are exploring, building, conquering, fighting, and making a show of their accomplishments to anyone who will listen. Girls, on the other hand, very quickly turn their attention towards games centered around identity role-play—practicing the art of being, not doing.

To become special, men must do, and they must do for the benefit of women and children.⁵ This is true even in rigidly patriarchal cultures where the men build prisons to keep women and children protected from other men. These cultures are what we in the modern west would call “structurally abusive,” but the men that maintain them are nonetheless creating systems that guard the resource that women represent in service of the future, even if they do so in a way that maximally exploits women as a resource rather than championing them as people.

And to be a “true man”? A man of dignity, who is remembered well in the future, who is honored by his fellows and his charges? To be the kind of man who is not lost to the sands of history, but who leaves a mark upon the world that says “Though I was born disposable, I was not disposed of—I mattered”?

To be that kind of man, to be a man in full, a man must empty himself. He must spend his life in service to his family, his clan, his nation, and/or his legacy.

If he builds a business, that business will only succeed because it brings to the world more value than it extracts. A successful entrepreneur (even a billionaire titan of industry) will only ever lay hands on a tiny fraction of the wealth he produces.

Bill Gates, for example, isn’t a figure I have a great deal of affection for. I was on the anti-Microsoft, anti-Gates train back when he was considered something of a secular saint. Unfortunately for Gates-critics like me, he earned that status as a secular saint. Using fair means and foul, he turned computers from a tool of billion-dollar corporations and a toy for the rich-and-geeky into something that sat on every desk in every corner of the globe, and could be used by anyone who could push a mouse around. Yes, he did it with stolen tech (so did Steve Jobs). Yes, he did it with shady business deals. Yes, he eventually made a lot of money extracting rents from governments. And yes, he’s abused the wealth and power he accumulated along the way (and started doing so very early on). Nonetheless, Bill Gates has created more millionaires (among his investors, his partners, his employees, and the millions of businesses that depend upon his products) than almost anyone else who has ever lived, and he’s given millions more people the ability to earn a living doing everything from founding their own companies to working in call centers using software that his employees developed.

And he’s typical of entrepreneurs in this way. Check it out:

Masculinity is heroic by definition:

A man does the right thing, according to his goals and obligations, whatever the cost.

And he’s gotta have the balls to follow through.

The ways a man can live heroically are impossible to enumerate—he can go to war, he can build a business, he can bring home a paycheck, he can don a fireman’s outfit and rush into a burning building, he can spend the precious hours of his life comforting the dying and grieving, he can mend cars or broken bones, he can wrestle steers, he can design skyscrapers or run a rivet gun—but everything he does that benefits another human fulfills the central impulse and mandate of masculinity:

To spend himself in service of the future.

Men who do not live heroically know this. Whether they are restrained from doing so by society, robbed of the opportunity by fate, or fail to rise to the challenge because of poor character and/or hopelessness, their inability to be men breeds in them deep resentment.

It is why they are dangerous.⁶

We men are stronger, faster, taller, and ballsier than women. We can kill by accident. We can impregnate without intention. We are powerful, but we are also disposable.

Power brings responsibility—which is a good thing, because to escape being disposed of, we must take on obligations that direct our power towards useful ends.

This can manifest in some very unusual ways. Consider the cases of two middle-aged men of my near acquaintance, Bob and Jeff.

Both had parents—who were not good parents—who fell on hard times. Both men were the black sheep of their families, not well regarded by the parents in question. Both had siblings who conceivably could have aided said parents, but opted not to (out of legitimate resentment).

But because both were men who understood what it meant to be men, both sliced out significant portions of their life to see their delinquent parents to safety at great personal expense (including, in both cases, the expense of a stable place to live). Both were met, for their troubles, with stunning ingratitude by the objects of their sacrifice, who felt humiliated at having their most-loathed children bail them out.

This kind of behavior pattern is pretty common among at least Gen X men—I’ve seen something similar unfold a couple dozen times over the past decade. It’s a behavior pattern predicated upon ethics, not affection, and it echoes what used to be the universal pattern (that grown children keep an eye on their aged parents), but that more-or-less disappeared in the past forty years as managed care facilities emerged to meet the demands of Baby Boomers who preferred to see to their responsibilities using a consumer-friendly solution. It would otherwise be literally un-remarkable, because it is the kind of sacrifice that is simply expected and normal.

It is what men do.

Which is why pieces like this one so widely miss the mark:

Men don't need to be heroes. They just need to be people.

Ms. Whippman’s article is part of an ongoing discussion within left-wing circles speculating on how they can bring men back into the electoral fold. In opposition to socialist thinker Caitlan Flannagan (who attempted to champion the left-wing warrior ethos in her recent piece for the Atlantic, In Praise of Heroic Masculinity), Whippman argues that men are choking under the burden of the expectation of heroism. It’s a sensitive, obviously well-meaning plea for giving boys some elbow room to let them become who they are. Whippman’s advances her argument upon an understanding of pressure, performance, social modeling, etc. that applies very well to women, but simply does not make sense where men are concerned.

She would be closer to the mark if she made the argument (as I do in my book The Secrets of the Heinlein Juvenile) that the superhero Chosen-One model can create problems. Whether that hero is Harry Potter or Superman, the Chosen-One who does not have to earn his place⁷ represents a model separated from the male consciousness by an unbridgeable gulf:

Identity.

The superhero who is appointed by destiny is a feminine model. He is special because he is born that way, and he doesn’t have to do anything in order to earn his destiny; in this way he is just like a princess, who is special because of how she was born, and who gets to choose her prince based on what he does to impress her.

If a boy’s heroes are all Harry Potters, if he has no other good models of manhood, he will have a hell of a time learning to be a man, and will be at risk for being a failed man who (due to his resentment) becomes a danger to all who surround him.

Whippman’s title, Men Don’t Need to be Heroes, They Just Need to be People is exactly wrong. Men who cannot become everyday heroes eventually cease to even be viable people.

All adults attain their maturity through facing challenges and growing, but women become women when their bodies say “it’s time”; women are born as girls destined to be women.

Men, on the other hand, must become men through repeated, often brutal, rites of passage and acts of heroism.

If you’ve ever wondered why so many heroes wind up wounded, beaten, bereft, boozing, and dying (only to eventually resurrect) in fiction, now you know:

This is how males become men.

And men—at least self-possessed men—are frequently accused of being insufferably arrogant.

Arrogance

Which brings us back to narcissism for a moment:

Arrogance is an air of being better than others. It doesn’t always entail looking down on others, but it usually does. Grandiose narcissists surely do project an air of “I’m better than you are.” However, they do it specifically with the intention of roping others into reinforcing their self-image.

Arrogance, itself, is not only not narcissistic, but in both of its forms it is (at least sometimes) valuable, and in one of its forms it is downright desirable.

The first of these flavors is unearned arrogance. This is the flavor you see among people who are enthusiastically learning something new. Its technical name is “sophomoritis,” from the Greek roots “sophia” (wisdom) and “moros” (the root of our word “moron”). A “sophomore” is literally a “wise fool.” The sophomore knows just enough about a subject to believe he has mastered it, and is thus prone to arrogant pronouncements that get him into trouble when he runs into someone more sophisticated than he. But, despite being annoying in the extreme, the arrogance of the sophomore serves an important function: It fuels the enthusiasm to catapult the sophomore over the hurdle of transitioning from dilettante to expert.

The second of these flavors is earned arrogance. This is the arrogance of the expert—someone who knows his shit, knows very well how much he does know (and doesn’t know), and who is quite comfortable with the fact that he is simply better than those around him in some measurable respect. Josh Slocum recently published an article explaining his own expertise on the topic for which he’s made himself famous. The irritation he displays in his article is common among anyone—from an athlete to an academic—who finds himself socially obligated to fight with one hand tied behind his back, metaphorically speaking.

Obligated?

Well, yes.

One of the central perversions of democracy is its loathing of any reminder that there are, in fact, qualitative distinctions between people. If you’re really good at something—anything—you understand that people are not, in fact, equal (though you’re likely to forget this when your ego gets bruised). There really are people who are better than you at whatever-it-is-you-care-about. “The world’s greatest” anything is rare. Approximately 1-in-8-billion rare.

This fact is, frankly, offensive. In Screwtape Proposes a Toast, C.S. Lewis (speaking as a demon) explains why:

[Democracy] is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of human feelings. You can get him to practice, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.

The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you.

The loathing of arrogance is a stealthy way to destroy beauty, to make war on strength, to venerate envy as a virtue, and to pull those who dare to do extraordinary things back down into the bucket with the rest of the squabbling crabs.

While unearned arrogance will occasionally (often?) need correcting by those further along the road (if allowed too much free reign it can become destructive and prevent the growth it’s meant to encourage), and while earned arrogance should generally be tempered by grace and gentleness, true arrogance (both earned and unearned) is a gift to the community.

What is not a gift is narcissistic arrogance: that which bloviates as a way to morally censure someone who makes you feel inadequate.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard frequently tries this maneuver on the god-like trickster alien named Q. This dynamic fueled some fantastic episodes in the TV series, but author Peter David played it to the hilt in his novel Q-Squared, where Q, finally fed up with Picard’s petty preachments, snaps:

"And you accuse me of arrogance? Picard, I could blast this ship out of existence if I felt like it. I could grow hair on your head. Turn your crew into embryos, force Worf to recite doggerel. I could turn your ship inside out, your reality outside in. I am not being condescending, Picard... not that I'm incapable of it, you understand, but this simply isn't one of the times. Now, what I most definitely am, Picard, is arrogant. Why? Because I have a reason to be. I have a right to be. So... mortal... what's your excuse?"

It’s humiliating to get dressed down like that.

And, as any expert or high-achiever in any field will tell you, that kind of humiliation is absolutely essential to the process of growth.

Which brings us neatly to that prime example of arrogance that gets regular hate:

Those loathsome bastards with Main Character Syndrome.

Main Character Syndrome

Now that we’ve dealt with those trifling matters, it’s time for the big one.

Think about a political or business figure. Someone who gets a lot of press.

While you’re at it, make it someone you hate.

Maybe it’s someone in the new ascendant power block—Musk, Yarvin, Thiel, Trump, Andreesen, Rogan, Friedman, or anyone else who’s new on the scene from what was, until a few months ago, a member of the dissident class.

Or maybe it’s someone from the side that was, until recently, the establishment. Obama, Gates, Ellison, Buffet, Soros, Pelosi, Schiff, Biden, Harris, Cortez, and the like.

Or, move it away from politics. Let’s do entertainment. Think of Bono, John Lennon, Taylor Swift, Sean Combs (P. Diddy), or Lady Gaga.

Let’s assume you’ve got a good reason to hate them. You aren’t just following the propaganda or cheering based on team loyalty, you’ve got some well-founded reasons for your hatred.

I believe you do.

For most of the people listed above, I can rattle off a half dozen reasons apiece to hate them, fear them, find them irritating, and generally shower them with reprobation. You don’t accumulate that kind of power, influence, and prestige without making a few enemies and pissing off people who once counted themselves as your friends and partisans.

Narcissists, all of them, right?

They must be. They obviously think they’re the main characters in life. They spend all their time in front of the public, currying favor, and hogging all the glory. And if there’s one thing we can be sure of, it’s that nobody is that important.

Such people (and others who are perceived—rightly or wrongly—as acting entitled) are said to have Main Character Syndrome, a particularly acute form of grandiose narcissism that makes them extra odious, above and beyond the garden variety asshole.

I’ve got a background in clinical psychology.⁸ I’ve also spent a non-trivial amount of time circulating in circles frequented by several of the people on the above list—I’ve even met a couple of them, in professional contexts, in passing, as well as other people whose names you’d know in the worlds of tech, entertainment, and punditry (a.k.a. public intellectuals). I know a few things about these people and those like them, both from direct experience and as the result of my study that you might find relevant:

These are the people whose actions change the direction of history.

They are the people whose names will be remembered in the history books.

There is a very good chance that at least some of them will set the entire agenda of the human race for the next century-or-more.

Some of them are narcissists.

But not all of them.

And in neither case does it matter.

Because none of them—not a single one—has Main Character Syndrome.

They are the Main Characters.

You and I may, if we are lucky, leave a mark on history. Someone reading this column may eventually ascend to the arena to tussle with these people over the fate of the human race.

But these people are already there.

The world they inhabit is nothing like yours. The moral universe they inhabit is not one you have access to. They live their professional lives (and for many of them, their private lives) entirely within the ecosystem of power, where our democratic values (see Screwtape’s quote, above) don’t even bear a passing thought.

A World of Distinctions

For the last decade, our culture has been in the grip of a moral panic: a totalitarian wave of mutual censure we’ve come to call “cancel culture,” whereby the masses rise up to mob people from all social classes and punish them for the slightest deviations from the ever-shifting morality-of-the-moment.

And, even as the institutional support for that trend is waning, the masses (which includes all of us here) seem to be having trouble letting go of that delicious power we thought we had to ruin the lives of others.

When you know nothing, the world is flat. All men are created equal. Men and women are basically the same. What’s right and good for one person (such as you) is what’s right and good for another (such as me).

And then, if you are wise, something happens to you that changes your entire understanding of the world:

You grow the fuck up.

When you do, something marvelous happens:

You discover that the world is varied. That there are distinctions. That there is such a thing as greatness (and that it is not always terrible). That the right path for one person might not be the right one for another—and that, in any case, it is the person on that path who must reap its consequences. That the world is not interested in your moral judgments. That your opinions almost always simply do not matter. That, to quote Gandalf, you are only quite a little fellow, in a wide world, after all.

And, because you’ve grown up, you can honestly reply as Bilbo did:

“Thank goodness.”⁹

You are not responsible for the direction of the universe. You’re not obliged to sit in judgment on every stupid controversy that comes along. You have the freedom to relax, to seek understanding, and to watch as the currents of the universe eddy around you. You may even figure out which waves to catch.

The schemes of the powerful, the abilities of the exceptional, the audacity of the model, the showiness of the camgirl or the showman or the televangelist or the politician…they don’t really matter all that much.

Because you are just you, and you have the power to direct your attention where you see fit. You don’t have to waste your energies on the trivialities that provoke your self-importance.

You have the freedom to not give a fuck.

When you grow up, you begin to wonder:

Who’s the true narcissist? The showy motherfucker up there on the stage, or the punter who believes that calling names actually means anything at all?

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1. Everything referenced in this opening (and the rest of this essay) represents at least one article I’ve read on this platform in the past six months. Very few of these articles are linked to in the course of this post, as I am not looking to pick personal fights. If you haven’t seen anything resembling the apparent targets of this rant, feel free to consider this your “old Dan yells at cloud” entertainment for the day.

2. In my characterization of Chandler, I am reporting facts, not engaging in character destruction. Nor am I meaning to defame his work—on the contrary, my series The Clarke Lantham Mysteries is directly and nakedly inspired by his work (and he is credited in the acknowledgments). Like many authors, Chandler was able to create characters who were better men than he was (in Marlowe, I think we see Chandler’s vision of the man he wished he could be). If I were to chose the most essential reading from the 20th century, Chandler is one of those rare authors whose entire corpus I’d recommend. They are sublime, rich, and a pleasure to read.

3. It’s also why women and girls are the primordial and perpetual prize of wars, and are so often subject to imprisonment and abuse throughout history. Nobody bothers to steal, conquer, or destroy something that has no value.

4. This is a biological reality. Obviously distributing the sperm of a handful of men to all the women on the planet would present certain logistical problems. This doesn’t mean that men have no practical or social value—read on for that—I’m talking pure biology here.

5. Things which further the civilization, advance justice or prosperity or meaning, make life bearable or joyful, and maintain the structures that make life possible all count as “for the benefit of women and children,” for reasons that should be obvious.

6. See: serial killers, spree killers, televangelists, serial rapists, suicide bombers (and other species of imperialist terrorists), and artists of the long con (yes, they all share a common motivational structure).

7. This is the essential distinction between the 21st century “Chosen One” and the ancient sons of the gods (such as Perseus and Heracles). The sons of the gods may have been chosen in the sense that their parent-god was on their side, but they still had to fight their way through and make good on their own—fighting which included a great deal of failure and struggle, both internal and external. The primary obstacle that the 21st century “Chosen One” must overcome is self-doubt (this character type is typified by Harry Potter, and raised to a cartoonish level by Rey Palpatine).

8. Specifically, I got most of an MA in Clinical Psych before I realized I did not want to be a therapist, and changed my educational track. I have since kept current on clinical and experimental psychology as part of my job as an artist and novelist.

9. From the final pages of The Hobbit