"The Man Who Was Thursday" and G.K. Chesterton are more relevant now than ever before.

[u/stevedsign1]

First post here. I've been wondering again and again how Chesterton would think and act in today's social media saturated age. (Honestly, I'm sure he'd be a streamer!) But recent events in the news made me think about how relevant "The Man Who Was Thursday" is with all the violent extremism in social media and how it affects reality.

The follow passage resonated with me in particular:

“The work of the philosophical policeman,” replied the man in blue, “is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet.”

“Do you mean,” asked Syme, “that there is really as much connection between crime and the modern intellect as all that?”

“You are not sufficiently democratic,” answered the policeman, “but you were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the poor criminal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon the ignorant and the desperate. But this new movement of ours is a very different affair. We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people’s.”

With criminals posting their manifestos on Twitter/X and the rise of extremists on social media and the incitement of violence, even touching upon the futility of normal police work, I feel like so many people can relate to this today.

[u/andreirublov1]

I think GKC would have loved the internet. In some ways he was more suited to write a blog than to write books.

[u/crzydjm → u/andreirublov1]

man oh man, I'd be all over that mailing list; I'd love to hear his thoughts of the last century

[u/ReddiTrawler2021]

It may be worth noting that Chesterton lived around the turn of the 20th century (1874-1936, so 26 years in the 19th century and 36 years in the 20th century), and was witness to enough of changing times that he may have felt disillusioned and out of place with his current times.

"I want to ask whether, if Don Quixote returned today with the same wild ways of knight errantry, it would not rather be the knight errant that was sensible and the world all around him that was crazy."

I do not know what news this is referring to, but I hope Chesterton holds relevance with it.