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Thomas Harrington

Thomas Harrington, Senior Brownstone Scholar and 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where he taught for 24 years. His research is on Iberian movements of national identity and contemporary Catalan culture. His essays are published at Words in The Pursuit of Light.

elite

The Art of the Encounter

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That still leaves us with 65-70 percent of the population who are not quite ready to accept the reality of the intense disdain our predatory government and corporate elites have for them, and who still want to believe, in some measure, in the possibility of justice and dignity under the rules of the game as currently constituted. 

doctor patient

Hi Doc, How’s It Going? 

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Given that you and the majority of your colleagues showed no moral and intellectual ability to mount a counterargument this time, what makes you think you’ll be able to do so the next time they decide to pressure you all from above to do this again? 

people abdicated responsibility

Experts have Abdicated Their Responsibilities 

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The social class that has received university education during the last thirty years has taken control of our institutions without assuming the responsibilities that go with this power. As a result we find ourselves in a society that depends on experts who, seeing the people as a manipulable mass, systematically ignore their will. They seek power but no longer even try to establish the moral authority required for the exercise of respectful leadership.

common good

The Cunning Tyranny of Abstract Notions of the “Common Good”

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One of the cardinal precepts of today’s Machiavellians and their esoteric court philosophers is the imperative of rewriting the operative rules early and often to the point where only the most stubborn and mindful among the rubes have the will to object to their carefully planned campaigns of moral disorientation. 

fathers

Those Silly Dads on TV 

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Watching this non-stop line of messaging you’d almost believe there are some powerful people out there in media-land who fantasize quite actively about a world without men, or at the very least, a world in which 49 percent of the culture would come to feel tentative and a little stupid about exercising the roles they have played in all healthy societies since the beginning of time. 

government sadism

The Sadism Factor

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If you have the ability, through your complete control of the government and media matrix to get an obviously mentally incompetent man into the highest office in the most powerful country in the world (while placing another—Fetterman—with similarly limited cognitive capabilities in that same country’s Senate in order to stave off possibly devastating Republican investigations) what can’t you do?

Treason of the Experts

The Destruction of Language as Tool of Power 

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It’s currently very fashionable in certain circles to talk about emotional resilience. What no one seems to talk about is cognitive or intellectual resilience, and how under the pressure of the semantic literalists it is being torn to pieces before our eyes. Language is a wonderful and amazingly complex tool that, if properly honed, allows for the perception and expression of nuanced understandings of the world, and from there, the imaginative creation of new hopes and possibilities. 

boundaries

The High Cost of Shattering Sensible Boundaries 

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Boundary-setting, and with it the transmission of trans-generational knowledge and the ability to calculate one’s true emotional proximity to others, are essential elements of a healthy culture. For reasons having a lot to do with the Baby Boomer generation’s tendency to often flippantly dispense with time-tested cultural knowledge in the name of “progress” and or “liberation,” many children have been deprived of an opportunity to gain these valuable skills. 

Treason of the Experts

How and Why the Intellectuals Betrayed Us

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Will we renew our trust in the dignity, moral autonomy and inherent miraculousness of each individual human being? Or will we, in our absent-minded drift away from the only true sources of life and spiritual renewal—things like love, friendship, wonder and beauty—resign ourselves to the idea of living a new version of medieval serfdom, wherein our bodies and our minds are seen as, and used by, our self-appointed masters as a renewable resource for the execution of their megalomaniacal dreams? 

planned culture

What Kind of Culture Are They Planning for you?

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Those who in this very moment are seeking to radically change our core conceptions of liberty and our relationships to our own bodies though their aggressive culture-planning have, so far, faced relatively little serious intellectual opposition to their efforts. This is mostly because the salaried inhabitants of universities and key institutions of culture, who under the implied rules of democratic liberalism are supposed to act as a critical check upon such efforts, have mostly failed to do so. 

guilt and shame

The Elimination of Healthy Guilt Leads to a Reign of Shaming

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If we are to immunize ourselves against their ever more aggressive and manipulative designs, we must talk back to their constant and abusive invocation of the specter of human perfection, be it in the realm of the insisting on morally pristine life trajectories, or our supposed ability to fully subdue massively complex natural phenomena—like the constant circulation of viruses—with brilliant inventions.

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