A recent video I watched, on veterans of the American Civil War, cast into sharp relief the preoccupations of our age. If only, the video argued, people then had understood PTSD, and an army of psychotherapists with ready prescriptions had been on hand, much human suffering would have been ameliorated. It is typical of a time that views everything in narrowly scientific terms, as though the solution to human happiness is only a misfiring neural transmitter away, as beforehand it was only a couch session with Freud away. The suicide of many of Freud’s first crop of psychoanalysis should put paid to the latter, and the recent discovery that SSRI medication is not the holy grail should do the same for the former. As we learn and relearn, shortcuts in life often lead to narrow gullies and sharp cliffs. To live is to suffer, and as Nicolás Gómez Dávila put it, “an irreligious society cannot stand the truth about the human condition. It prefers a lie, however idiotic it may be.”