By Francis X. Maier

But first a note from Robert Royal: We've gotten off to a good start in our mid-year fund drive, and I'm grateful to everyone who responded so generously. I was also pleased to find some encouraging messages from readers. To cite just a few: "The Catholic Thing is my favorite way to get my mind going in the morning, the essays certainly are thought-provoking and they're much needed in a world gone mad."

"A 91-year-old Englishman, I enjoy reading your daily emails/columns. AMDG" "Thank you for your daily dose of Faith and Reason." "It's comforting to still see some of the bedrock sticking up through the quicksand." "Looking forward to the treatment of the Catechism! God bless all of you at TCT!" It's remarks like these that help all of us keep focused on the task at hand. So I urge the rest of you to act now, do whatever you can to keep The Catholic Thing alive - and kicking.

Now for today's column...

Most of us live at least part of our lives on autopilot. Most of us also, sooner or later, stumble across Albert Einstein's famous warning: "Doing the same thing over and over again, while expecting different results, is the definition of insanity." Most of us then ignore the warning, because few of us listen the first time. As it turns out, Einstein's words are apocryphal. In real life, he never actually said them. Yet they're nonetheless true. And more importantly, they give us a chance to consider some key tidbits of wisdom, illustrated by Toonces, the Cat Who Could Drive a Car.

Who was Toonces? For those too young to know, or too old to remember him, Toonces was a frequent guest on Saturday Night Live, 1989-93. A uniquely gifted feline, Toonces was the treasured pet of an everyday human family with unshakable faith in his abilities. Where that typically led is best captured in the brief SNL "Martians" sketch archived here.

Toonces was the brainchild of writer Jack Handey, a comedic genius. We can laugh at Toonces and his antics because they capture something true about ourselves. We all have a few unthinking habits; a pattern of brainlessly repeated mistakes tucked away somewhere in our lives. We're each of us imperfect creatures. And our imperfections, in a marvelously ironic, if too-often boneheaded manner, seal us together in a common humanity. We complete each other in more ways than one. God, it turns out, has a vivid sense of humor.

Here's the problem: Our little personal foibles, given the right climate and numbers, tend to metastasize into larger, less entertaining tumors.

Remember that other, not so funny writer; the one who suggested "from each according to his ability; to each according to his need"? That particular Big Idea – tried again and again, more and more forcefully over the past century with the same unpleasant results – cost some 100 million lives. Millions more were shoveled into forced labor systems. Some 65 million died in the wake of the Chinese Communist revolution, the "Great Leap Forward," and the Red Guard turmoil. Pol Pot's modest attempt at social reform buried two million Cambodians. This, in a population of seven million. And the same sunny Big Idea currently gestates, like the creature from Alien, in some of our loudest, most annoyingly "progressive" political figures.

Happily, we Americans don't believe in utopias. Some of us don't seem to believe in anything more than ourselves. If by "we," one means our secularized leadership classes, we're pragmatic in our convictions. We believe that happiness is a product of maximum personal liberty; maximum self-realization; maximum material abundance.

We believe that more of whatever we want, or think we need, is always good. This is why more money for bigger budgets is always the answer to obviously ill-structured, misconceived public-school systems that produce semiliterate adults. Looking back, this also explains our actions in Vietnam. The solution was always more troops, more bombing, more aid programs. In effect, more of t...