Thanks, I love reading your essays. Even when I disagree (rarely), you always make me think.
And what occurred to me while reading this is that socialism is just as deadly as communism to the human spirit. Communism, however, will hunt people down, barcode them, work them and outright kill them in a manic, fevered obsession with control and domination. But socialism kills through neglect. It’s not what socialism does to people - it’s what it forbids them to pursue, to think, and to dream. For example, the imposition of politically correct speech is communistic, but its continued peer-to-peer manifestation is socialism.
In the same way, the vacation that has replaced the vocation in your model is similiar, in that it is a communist imposition full of ideas which, in reality, turns out to be the creation of an environment of aimlessness that sucks the very air out of life. And from that, the abandonment of the spiritual quest is virtually accomplished even before it is labelled as such.
I wonder if the apparent European death urge through accomodating Islam isn’t, in actuality, the most passive possible invocation of a mechanism to overturn the soul-rotting socialism that has encased them all like flies in a web. Granted, it is a solution that will encase them all in fire and war before it is through, but perhaps even that is now seen as a viable option by millions trapped in sterile, empty lives of their endless vacations from meaning.