Rain-soaked in The Villages, Florida kicked off a summer of David Mamet. It nearly never happened. The Barnes and Noble was closing in ten minutes when I showed up soaking wet. I had finished a book on the odyssey from Boise to The Villages and had forgotten to pack the book I planned to read next.
Victor Davis Hanson had David Mamet on his podcast, and they spoke of his new book, The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment. The show embarrassed me. I never knew that David Mamet was behind some movies I loved: The Untouchables, The Edge, Glengarry Glenross and American Buffalo. I loved their discussion, and Victor Davis Hanson mentioned that Mamet is one of the best writers of our time, and one of his favorites. That perked my interest, since VDH rarely drops a comment like that.
I looked for The Disenlightenment on the shelves of Barnes and Noble and yielded nothing. I spotted an employee doing her checklist to close the store. I walked over, my soaked shoes making that squish-fart sound and asked if they had Mamet’s book. She said they had it. We went over to the shelf and couldn’t find it. She said it should be here and that they have a few copies. We hunted for it, the store closed in two minutes, and she said maybe they were all sold and the system hadn’t updated it yet. I moved a book that looked out of place, and there behind it were the copies of The Disenlightenment.
So began my summer of Mamet.
Sometimes an author hooks you. A line, a paragraph, a chapter, or an essay, hits you. I had expected a solid cultural and political critique from Mamet. I expected to read only The Disenlightenment and then move on. I did not expect to end up reading him all summer. I did not expect to get closer to my Christian faith (Mamet is Jewish). I did not expect a master class into the arts, nor did I expect to walk away with deeper understandings of human nature, including the nature of myself, my loved ones, and basic truths of humans.
Mamet’s first few passages hooked me. After the first passage, I knew I was only going to read Mamet for most of the summer. It made for a great summer. The books read:
The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment
Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch
Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood
The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture
Background
David Mamet is an iconic playwright, screenwriter, and producer.
Hollywood is a leftist world. It has been for decades. Those in it, like Mamet, are considered the liberal Elite, like the George Clooneys of the world. Mamet is Jewish, and most Jews are liberals. Most Jews in Hollywood are far left-liberals. Mamet grew up liberal. Yet sometime during the late 1990s Mamet began wrangling with his liberal worldview due to his personal observations of human nature, of modern media, and of the truths he felt he conveyed in his plays and movies.
His wrangling turned to rumination, and when rumination reaches a boiling point in the mind, it surfaces in conversation. Somewhere along the line he ruminated aloud to someone, and that someone recommended he check out White Guilt by Shelby Steele.
Mamet did not have a Road to Damascus moment. Shelby Steele did not convince him with the raw power of his arguments. Rather, Mamet came home to his values. He sought answers to questions and discovered he was a conservative.1 Upon realizing this, he decided to learn his worldview to understand his nature, what existed behind his observations of human nature, and to understand the world he lived in. He read Thomas Sowell, Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, John Locke, and more Shelby Steele.
I read his works from the latest, The Disenlightenment back to his first political book The Secret Knowledge. One work, Everywhere an Oink Oink was more on Hollywood, the creative process, and spilling dirt and truths on Hollywood.
Each book is at one end a collection of essays, yet they all work as a book from start to finish. The themes and pacing are connected. And what makes them special are the authentic memoir pieces, which convey the human experience. Mamet doesn’t just cover politics or political philosophy; he takes turns into human nature, interpretations of the Bible, writing a story, memoirs of his life, his love of his Jewish faith, and what faith from Christian and Jewish perspectives teaches and means for us. Each book is relatively short but demands time, as he inspires reflection and consideration.
Politics
Why do Denver constituents keep voting for policies that fail? And when they fail, why is it they can’t see it was the policy they voted for? Why is it for any failure they always blame a marginal minority in Denver, a minority without any influence or power, the Republicans? Why is it these constituents embrace the decline, seeing it as a means to an end to birth a city that will be a jewel on the world stage?
The list of personal questions goes on. Progressive politics marinates Denver and much of Colorado. When I moved to Boise, Idaho, and lived in a model of good governance, my questions of Denver constituents increased.
Mamet provided the answers. When I moved back to Colorado to be closer to family, I came back with far more understanding and far more pain from the knowledge.
Mamet does not castigate liberals like most political books. Nor does he do pop-psychoanalysis of liberals that you often find in podcasts or social media. Instead, he looks at human nature and the nature of the worldview of liberals, a worldview he once held.
His view complements and expands Thomas Sowell’s iconic Conflict of Visions. In that work, Sowell lays out the differences between the Constrained and the Unconstrained. The Constrained is on the right wing spectrum; it’s people who believe in the tragic view of human nature. That we’re all broken, full of contradictions, and we need to recognize this truth of our nature. That laws and government work best when they recognize human nature, that disparities of outcomes are innate to man and societies, and also recognize that bad apples exist and that it’s better to call it as it is, that they’re bad apples. The Unconstrained is the left spectrum, and it rejects that we’re broken and full of contradictions, and believes that we can escape our foibles and live as an ultimate being. The Unconstrained sees man as a chess piece on a chessboard, and a move can be made without consequences or trade-offs. They reject disparity of outcomes and believe equality of outcomes must be the goal for all; they do not recognize that bad apples exist, but instead those apples are victims of a system and the system must be changed. And they believe that changes to the system can be done without consequences, tradeoffs, or costs.
No person is 100 percent one or the other.
Mamet dissects the nature of both sides. His conviction, one I share with him, is that the conservative side of the spectrum is the organ of truth, the organ of reality. And the left tries to escape truth and alter reality to feelings, like the “Joy” campaign of Kamala Harris. Or as Mamet said on the Mike Rowe podcast, that those on the right, have sat down with a legal pad, looked at the costs, and had to become reasonable and reason with reality. While the left trashes the legal pad and believes feelings can evade reality.2
That trying to reject reality, to reject our nature, Mamet shows how liberal media or institutions will lie with word games in an attempt to feed that rejection in hopes of altering our reality. As he says it, they try to put a phrase out there where if you believe it, then you’ll believe anything. An example from my life recently: the midwifery center where my wife delivered our daughter, on its forms, pamphlets, and updates on the wall, the term “birthing person” is used. Used as if saying anything otherwise is anachronistic, backward, or, in other words, not reality. That it’s not a woman who gives birth; rather it is a birthing person. If someone believes that, then they will believe anything.
How Mamet captures human nature is compelling. If you’re a conservative, in Mamet he will give color, depth, and meaning to your worldview: why it is you have certain opinions, beliefs, and convictions. He doesn’t “own the libs” or throw red meat; he paints it into the human experience.
I could go on, like how he dissects Trump Derangement Syndrome on both sides, or why the virtue signaling, the moralizing behavior from the left, or why blue elite voters keep voting in policies that ruin their cities, among others.
Mamet delivers political analysis and dissection unlike anyone else I’ve read; his capability to bring it to the human level makes it compelling, engaging, and real.
Hollywood & Story
Even the books on politics wade deep into wisdom on Hollywood, writing, art, the art of critique, and more.
What struck me most was Mamet masterfully kneecapping modern story formulas, particularly the backstory formula we find ubiquitous in novels and movies. Mamet details how it’s a Freudian concept that seeped into story telling. The backstory formula proclaims that stories, in particular the characters, need emotional backstory, like a character bible, in order to tell us what motivates the character. The concept that some emotional incident tells us why the person does what he does and why he makes his choices. Mamet explains how this concept has ruined acting schools, actors, and writers of all sorts. He hilariously tells us why the writing gurus teaching this formula, the acting schools telling actors to come up with an emotional backstory, and movies and novels featuring it are nonsensical dross.
It’s not that the backstory is always bad, but it’s often overplayed or wholly unnecessary. For instance, in Mamet’s famous Glengarry Glenross we don’t get the backstory of the sales expert brought in with the leads. We don’t see that he was poor or that his mother hated him, or that he got ripped off at the lemonade stand; or in modern stories, that he’s Republican and a capitalist and that’s why he’s mean, and the backstory to that is a Native American trans woman beat him at basketball at age five, embarrassing him in front of his Christian parents, and since he had Christian parents, that means he had an abusive father who oppressed his wife and his wife’s potential, and it turned him into a capitalist, or something like that.
Or take the Old Man in the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. We don’t get an emotional backstory as to what motivates the old man. We instead get to know who he is by his choices and actions. We don’t read pages of him enduring the loss of his father at sea, or that his father was a drunk and that forced the main character to fish to feed his mother. We see words on a page; we meet the character where he is at. And in that novella, without emotional backstory, we get one of the richest stories ever written.
Mamet makes story, makes drama, human and real. And that is, we understand the character by the choices he makes, his actions, his decisions.
How he extrapolates, articulates, and details what drama is and how it’s real life, colored my understanding of story and characters, along with real life. Drama, says Mamet, is about repression. That repression is not in the Freudian sense, or the sense of a character repressing a memory or incident, or in the pervasive and now nearly meaningless concept of trauma. Mamet says those definitions are postmodern gobbledygook. Repression, rather, is not looking squarely at something, not seeing something for what it is.
For characters, it could be a person’s self-deception about themselves. Perhaps they are driven by a vice, say greed, and they do so at a moral cost, yet they believe they’re doing the right thing. So they maintain a pretense. As they maintain this pretense, their inability to see the hard truth about themselves often blocks what they want, or it makes them more chaotic, or however else it manifests.
He goes further: that, just like in real life, in what a character doesn’t say, if he evades a question, or deflects, or buries, or scrambles after a pretended a self-image versus the truth, this reveals to us, the audience, the repression.
As for the audience, what makes drama great is that we learn something about ourselves, as Mamet says. And it’s not the movie educating us, movies doing that are awful. Rather, it’s facing our inability to see something as it is, to face a hard truth of ourselves. For instance, in Mamet’s movie The Edge we face a reality that we would hate being lost in the wilderness and dealing with a rogue Kodiak bear. We, like the characters, would perhaps act rash, come up with similar ideas to survive that we see fail in the movie. And we would have a hard time of who do we trust to survive if we ourselves are incapable of it. And if we do have some wisdom, like Anthony Hopkin’s character of how to survive, what do we do if the others are not trusting us to lead them due to their perceptions of us. We face this truth as we watch it on screen.
We see how characters need to work together and how they clash. It is all too real. And to get back to the backstory, in a movie like The Edge we don’t get the backstory to what drives the character. A subplot exists in that movie, and Anthony Hopkin’s character is working to draw out information from Alec Baldwin, which requires some questions and carrots dangled to see if the truth comes out. This is also a truth: when we suspect someone lying to us, or evading something, we see the disconnect, and we want sunlight on it for whatever reason.
I could go on. Mamet, in each of the books, delivers a masterclass in story, understanding story, and what makes for good story. The same for character. And how real he makes it, how he brings it to the human element, it colors perspective on story.
Human Nature
To understand what someone means, you have to look at the choices. To expand, the actions, decisions, and choices someone makes tells us what they mean. The same goes for us as an individual. For you, to understand what you mean, look at your choices, the decisions, your actions. And the less we call our choice what it is, or the less we see it for what it is, the more repression we have.
It’s the same as the drama above. How Mamet laid it out in his books was a profound insight for me. It’s simple, sure, yet how he articulated it sharpened the colors of my world. It inspired a lot of ruminating walks around my old neighborhood in the Boise foothills.
Mamet further goes on to detail that we, us humans, are all full of contradictions, foibles, irrationality, and folly. That folly is what makes us human, and it adds to the color of life, and not always negatively.
Wisdom or knowledge is often painful, as Mamet argues. That does not mean we wallow neurotically over regrets or past decisions; rather, it’s perspective. Consider our personal past. We all have regret: a night we’d like to take back; a yes we said when we should have said no. That’s the human experience. Yet our therapeutic culture is steeped in Freudian claptrap, “you can do anything” self-development chestnuts, a bogeyman to conveniently blame, and shallow self-actualization tropes of “that was the old me this is the new me” used to bury, justify, or rationalize a past event. All that is fueled by a marketplace of gurus, methods, ideology, tips, and formulas selling a sexier self-image. That we can buy a method, “do the work” and morph into a new self-image, thus escaping any accountability of our past, since all of that is conveniently labeled as baggage or toxic or old stories we told ourselves which held us back. That’s what caused bad relationships, bad hookups, bad jobs, so on and so forth with most anything we regret. All of it tries to absolve our responsibility in that regrettable yes, absolve our agency in our past choice, and abdicate our accountability in outcomes. It’s all repression.
For instance, blaming being drunk for hooking up with someone, or blaming parents to explain a negative behavior, or the easiest out, blaming some version of yourself with, “I was a different person back then.” Like the esteemed, and refreshingly no-bullshit, psychologist, Shawn Smith says, unless there was a life-altering medical event that changed the person’s personality, you are the same person.3 Anyone, and all of us, have made dumb decisions. We’ve all made youthful indiscretions. And sure, maybe our parents didn’t give us enough guidance, or perhaps we were young and didn’t know any better. Sure, someone may have manipulated us. Still, unless you had a gun to your head, you made the decision. And when any of us make a choice we believe we’re doing the right thing.
Maturity often comes from the pain of us knowing more. A result of maturity is wisdom. And that’s a result from the ability and willingness to shine sunlight on an event, as painful as the event was, without deflections, without evasion, without pretenses, or in other words, without absolving our responsibility in the matter. And we call it what it is; we come in with the truth. This allows us to move on from it, because whatever it was, we gain wisdom from it. The more we repress it, say it was something else, the more we stay stuck in immaturity, the more control that bad choice has over our life, and the more prone we are to make a choice like it again.
We can’t escape our human condition. The more we call our choices for what they are, the less bullshit we tell ourselves. We’ll still lie to ourselves. It’s impossible not to. But maturity comes from calling it out for what it is, and when we do, we’re going to have regret, painful regret sometimes, but we’re also going to gain perspective, wisdom, and convictions.
Faith
Mamet moved me much closer to my faith. He’s Jewish; I’m Christian. But how he dissects the Torah, the New Testament, and what faith means rooted me further into faith.
My summer of Mamet started fairly soon after reading The Praise of Folly by Erasmus. The Praise of Folly gifted me theological considerations of Christianity I needed and gave me a pragmatic understanding of my belief, the Church, and gave perspective on certain theological wrangling.
To get personal, I grew up Catholic, or Irish Catholic as I call it. When my dad died, the priest hit me up for $500,000 as the rate to get my dad into heaven; that combined with the child sex abuse scandal and how one of the worst offenders was the head priest of my grandmother’s church, seeing how that crushed her, I reflexively went atheist.
And I went full smug atheist. Yet, me being me, I wanted to explore my smug atheist view. So I read a number of famous atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, A.C. Grayling, Jean-Paul Sarte, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The odd thing is, when I dove full in and even used the clever arguments from Dennett and Grayling against believers, I, in the spirit of this article, repressed the idea that you can’t disprove God. I also repressed that professionally while finding wild financial success in internet marketing, I felt empty and lost. I knew, too, despite the amazing money, it was all unethical. Deeply unethical. And that journey into that unethical world stemmed a lot from repressing the loss of Clair Motors, repressing my rejection of the auto business, repressing my yearning ambition in the auto business, and repressing my vast inheritance via telling myself that the fortune I inherited was a curse versus a gift. All that repression had me in limbo.
At some point, the more I dug into those famed atheists, the less it swayed me. In fact, it started making me believe in a creator. Then while reading Edward Gibbon’s iconic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, along with my wife’s faith, I said to myself while reading on a balcony overlooking the Rockies on a gorgeous spring day, “Ok, enough messing around. I believe in Jesus Christ as my lord and savior.”
My coming back is more cerebral. The more I grip with the unknowns of life, the more the truth of Christianity spoke to me. Yet pragmatism and wisdom had me questioning the more rigid elements of Christianity. In fact, I found much of that green and naive. I also questioned some of the miracles in the Bible against the historical context that I knew of that time. Mamet brought me home though; Mamet brought me closer to my faith. He unlocked much of the Bible for me.
Mamet is what one would call a biblical conservative, but, he doesn’t believe the bible was written by God. He believes it was divinely inspired. And that, which aligned with my then secret belief after my own reading of the Bible and The History of the Bible by John Barton, that some of the stories are possible metaphors. To get simple, what connected the most, and what freed me to get closer to my faith, was that the Bible offers us truth on the human condition. It offers us divinely inspired wisdom on how to live, how to understand human nature, ourselves, and our world. And, like the human condition, the Bible has contradictions. Mamet, while Jewish, knows the New Testament inside and out and grasps what is called Pauline Psychology. I found Mamet pragmatic without going into the relativist nonsense, or the let-me-morph-faith-to-fit-my-views from a figure like Diarmaid MacCulloch. It opened up new doors for me, and I’m forever grateful.
Approaching Each Book
Each book looks like a curated collection of essays. Each chapter stands alone. Yet a thematic through line connects it all. Each book is relatively short, but you will need a dictionary. Mamet is a wordsmith and a word lover. He carefully picks the right word, and many of them require a dictionary. It’s not all big words either, like the word bumf.
And how he writes some of the passages, the beautiful yet razor-sharp rhetoric, it needs deliberation.
While serious, each book is filled with humor. Mamet is heady but his head isn’t stuffed up his ass; he has a street sense. That mixed with the wordsmithing makes for interesting reading.
It’s accessible to the more cerebral person. You will need a dictionary; you will need to look up certain philosophical or theological or artistic themes, but Mamet is clear. You will learn a lot of the world and of yourself through reading him.
Who Would Like It
As I said, the more cerebral thinker will like it. If you’re interested in human nature, why we do the things we do, it’s a masterclass.
If you’re a conservative or right wing, right-leaning, whatever the definition on the right side of the scale, any of the works listed will offer depth to your worldview and will articulate certain convictions you hold of the world.
If you’re a liberal, and wish to know the worldview of those on the right, and what we believe, any of these works will give you an understanding. Mamet will offend you, likely. Yet if you wish to have an idea of our convictions and beliefs and why, you will not go wrong with Mamet.
Anyone interested in story, whether you’re writing stories, want to grasp the creative beats of movies better, Mamet will turn your world inside out. Especially if you’re familiar with “emotional backstory” or “method acting” concepts or the current tropish version of the “hero’s journey.” He will give insights that seem painfully obvious yet we never really noticed it before. He brings real life into viewing drama and somehow gives us a greater understanding and even enjoyment of story.
I mentioned human nature, but if you’re interested in human psychology, the human condition, why we do the things we do, or why others do the things they do, Mamet is going to open your eyes, and with it will come pain.
A Personal Aside
The last two decades I’ve wrangled with my Clair Motors and my car business identity. I buried it down for years and refused to look at it. That burying, I know, led to certain choices that were not great. And I, my agency, made those choices. Those choices led to regret I eschewed confronting. I read Mamet at the right time. On my walks in the Boise foothills, in the oppressive high desert heat, Mamet inspired me to put sunshine on past choices going back all the way to high school even like when I quit hockey.4 And it gave my regrets perspective, which didn’t provide closure but instead provided a sense of grounding. I used to not tell people about my car business background, or that Clair Motors was a behemoth of a business, yet I’ve now opened up on it. When, with my wife while visiting Boston in August of 2025, I pulled into the old Clair Motors headquarters on the VFW Parkway in West Roxbury. As we sat in the car, I could see my old visions and dreams hanging above the Toyota building. Regret, what-ifs, and questions were all ruminating in my mind. I recognized the choices, the perspective, what my wife learned of me (she said I’m a car biz guy, way more than an internet marketer, and this she said after meeting a few of my old car biz colleagues). It hit in a way that maybe I’ll never be able to describe clearly. Yet it gave a sense of pride to my last name, to my family, and to see how blessed I am in life, even with the pain and the regrets. This personal aside may not offer anything to you, but if you have some nagging what-ifs in your life, Mamet may offer some insight.
Recommended
Mamet hit me like a train. I could go on and on about the choice thing.
While I laid out categorical themes here, Mamet blends it all together. His writing is powerful, poignant, salty, and beautiful. I recommend any of the works listed. His works will certainly be in the running for best non-fiction I read in 2025.
For the quibblers out there I see on social media who fret over right wing groups and camps, by conservative here I mean right wing. Conservatism is the organ of right wing ideology and worldview. Libertarians are an answer for everything and a solution for nothing. While the types who virtue signal with, “What have conservatives ever conserved!?” are blowhard dorks rehashing a trope. So before you get your panties in a bunch and want to know if he is a boomercon, neocon, paleocon, New Right, tradcon, or whatver, go breath into a paper bag.
https://x.com/ironshrink/status/1944031307794641375 (he also further expands on this in his books)
I was a solid high school player. I played in the competitive Independent School League, Keller division for Governor’s Academy. I was getting some looks from Division 3 colleges. Before the season started, my mom had the notion that my coach was out to get me. I bought into the conspiracy, and my senior year before the first home game, this conspiracy was racing in my head and because of that, I bugged him for a week that I should switch positions to right wing. Why? I don’t know, since I loved playing defense. This communication fiasco got me benched for a game. I took it as part of the conspiracy. That benching, looking back, was life altering. Where I went to college, to where I now live, and all of the things that flowed from it. I spoke to my old coach recently, and it turned out it was a big communication fiasco. But it altered everything for me.
Incredible essay, Jim. I recently started looking into Mamet's plays and will now include his nonfiction. I deeply resonate with his views regarding human nature. Funny you mention West Roxbury. I grew up in Hyde Park and went to high school in West Roxbury.
I'll be diving into some of Mamet's essays shortly. Great read.
The leads are weak.