“The man with the X-ray eyes”

From Mark Lilla, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024):

At the back of the classroom, or two stools down the bar, you’ll find him — the man with the X-ray eyes. He sees through it all. Whatever subject you discuss, he recites the same catechism: noble actions always have selfish motives, institutions only serve those who run them, beliefs are manufactured to oppress, and every book, every idea, every artwork, every utterance expresses a hidden agenda. Nothing is what it seems. This is the esoteric wisdom that joins in intellectual matrimony the sophomore smart aleck and the college professor whose vanity is fed every semester by revealing the truth that truth is an illusion and that everything is permitted. (Which his students, a step ahead of him, take to mean that nothing is worth doing.)

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