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Posted maybe a decade ago on FR:

It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then to loosen up. Inevitably though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker.

I began to think alone - “to relax,” I told myself - but I knew it wasn’t true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time.

I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don’t mix, but I couldn’t stop myself.

I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka.

I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, “What is it exactly we are doing here?”

Things weren’t going so great at home either. One evening I had turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother’s.

I soon had a reputation as a heavy thinker. One day the boss called me in. He said, “Skippy, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don’t stop thinking on the job, you’ll have to find another job.” This gave me a lot to think about.

I came home early after my conversation with the boss. “Honey,” I confessed, “I’ve been thinking...”

“I know you’ve been thinking,” she said, “and I want a divorce!”

“But Honey, surely it’s not that serious.”

“It is serious,” she said, lower lip aquiver. “You think as much as college professors, and college professors don’t make any money, so if you keep on thinking we won’t have any money!”

“That’s a faulty syllogism,” I said impatiently, and she began to cry. I’d had enough. “I’m going to the library,” I snarled as I stomped out the door.

I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche, with NPR on the radio. I roared into the parking lot and ran up to the big glass doors... they didn’t open. The library was closed.

To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night.

As I sank to the ground clawing at the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye. “Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?” it asked. You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinker’s Anonymous poster.

Which is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker. I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was “Porky’s.” Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting.

I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home. Life just seemed... easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking.

Not that I wish to curtail references to the Thought Police, because they are a real menace and ever-growing. But it’s at least partly misguided to think that what seperates hate “crimes” is that they’re an intrusion into people’s heads. They are an undue intrusion, but that’s not what makes them special.

For the law has long felt free to jump inside your mind when deciding if and for how long to lock you up, be it to divine intent, to determine whether you’re mentally fit to stand trial, etc. But one thing they’ve never done is criminalized motive. Despite what tv and movies say, and how often it is gabbed about in actual courtrooms, motive is neither here nor there. At best it is a story you tell to the jury, to make them understand better than isolated pieces of evidence can.

But as they probable teach you the first day of law school, or if they don’t they should, it’s the easiest thing in the world to blow up the prosecution’s motive argument. Just demonstrate that people other than the defendant had motives. Which will be true of everyone, because theoretically everyone has a motive to kill everyone they know, and for every murder victim there are maybe a hundred people with the motive to have done it. Which is why, among other things, never in the history of Anglo-American, to say nothing of any other variety, jurisprudence has motive been an element of crime.

Not until, that is, our egalitarian, classless society decided to make special classes out of non-heterosexual white males. This they did for revenge, long, long after Whitey’s monopoly on power ended, and despite the much larger problem of non-white-on-non-white crime.