Nearly twenty years ago, a good friend — a gifted coder from San Francisco — brought a young man to our house in Big Sur. He was a leader in what would now be called an antifa group, handsome, intelligent and articulate, with a terrific head of hair. He was also a ‘coder’ or ‘web cowboy’ as I called him and others at the time. At first I thought what irritated me was simply his narcissism: the self-confidence, the self-aggrandizement, the slightly amused condescension toward people who did not understand what he understood. (Like me!)

My friend has never wanted to revisit that evening, and I don’t push him, but the visit stayed with me, partly because I recognized something in him that was not entirely foreign to me. (Like I said!)

I grew up in Sweden and came of age in Europe in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when revolution was in the air, and I wasn’t immune to its romance. I admired conviction. Maybe I even glorified it. There is something deeply seductive about a person who seems to know what life is about, who has found a direction, a purpose, a cause larger than himself. Someone who wakes up in the morning knowing what side he is on, what........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)