Snoring to Success

The Hemisphere Hypothesis won’t teach you how to wrench a lug nut off a busted tire and it won’t tell you how to deal with the beard in your daughter’s locker room. It’s a theory, not a socket set or a crowbar. And for all its highfalutin talk about brain wiring and reality, it’s about as useful as a paper towel in a hurricane when you’re staring down the barrel of practical problems.

That’s the complaint, anyway . . . from the left hemisphere.

But only a left-hemisphere drunk on its own logic could look at the mess we’re in—economic Ponzi schemes, cultural decay, trannies in the girls’ showers—and declare as irrelevant a theory about how we think.

The Hemisphere Hypothesis ain’t about torque specs or locker room policies. It’s about how you carry yourself when the rubber’s flat and the world’s gone sideways. It’s about reframing the blown tire as something other than a personal affront from the universe. It’s about navigating the daily shitstorm of modernity—traffic jams, woke commissars, and all—without losing your mind.

I scribble about this stuff at Flourishing Despite Modernity, where I use the Hemisphere Hypothesis to make sense of how to live well in a world that’s forgotten how to live at all.

Now, that locker room situation? The Hemisphere Hypothesis gets murkier there. It’s one thing to philosophize about right-hemipsheric calm in the face of chaos, but when you’ve got a cultural revolution strutting through the showers, backed by sanctimonious bureaucrats from here to D.C., you’re not exactly pondering hemispheric balance. You’re wondering how we got to a point where common sense got kicked to the curb and replaced with a clown show.

Snoring Through the Apocalypse

Let’s talk about Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian general who sent Napoleon packing with his tail between his legs.

How’d he do it?

By napping, mostly. Snoring through strategy sessions, doodling on his personal whims while everyone else was screaming for action. In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Kutuzov’s genius was in knowing something bigger than his own ego was at play, some deeper current of fate or nature or whatever you want to call it. He didn’t meddle. He didn’t micromanage. He let the world turn and trusted it would grind Napoleon’s grand army into dust.

Albert Jay Nock, in his essay “Snoring as a Fine Art,” said Kutuzov mastered the art of keeping his left hemisphere on a leash. He let his right hemisphere, that quiet, intuitive side, call the shots. The result? A victory by attrition against the most fearsome war machine Europe had ever coughed up. No grand gestures, no heroic charges. Just patience, and a whole lot of doing nothing.

Now look at our government. It’s a left-hemisphere nightmare, a meddling, control-freak monstrosity that can’t resist sticking its nose into every corner of life. From pronouns to locker rooms to what kind of lightbulb you’re allowed to screw into your own socket, it’s all action, all the time.

And what’s the result? A society so twisted up in knots it can’t tell a man from a woman, let alone figure out how to fix a pothole. That tranny in the locker room? He’s not the problem. He’s the symptom of a system that’s forgotten how to leave well enough alone.

Imagine if our so-called leaders took a page from Kutuzov’s playbook. Imagine if their first instinct was to do nothing. To sit back, let the world breathe, and trust that not every problem needs a law, a task force, or a press conference. That’s the right-hemisphere way, the Taoist path of wu-wei—effortless action, the art of not forcing things.

Politics thrives on doing, on posturing, on fixing what ain’t broke until it shatters. But what if we started with non-action? What if we let the paradoxes of life—like the fact that doing nothing can sometimes win wars—guide us?

In a world gone mad with action, maybe the sanest move is to sit still, snore a little, and let the universe sort itself out. At least occasionally.