The History We Make Today
‘Progress’ in the traditional sense under these circumstances? Not likely. Today it seems more advisable to do our best to make history by imagining a position where humanity can start afresh, but with less innocence.
Do People Want Precious Freedom?
Social theorist Bauman wondered about freedom – do people really want to be free? Can they bear the challenges and responsibilities of being free? He approaches this question from the angle of ‘liberation,’ which is sometimes the prerequisite of being free.
Eradication Fantasies Don’t Come Free
Over the years, I have come to fear people who suggest they are above hate, and its correlates like prejudice and anger, more than I fear people who quite openly assault me with their hostility.
Life among Anti-Life Forces
If anti-life philosophy threatens our most sacred values, then what exactly are those values which it threatens? How can we make sure that we do not lose sight of all the positive actions we can take to nourish their seeds?
Savage Reservations
Unless we confront and fight these psychopaths, we shall all end up either in their obediently compliant perversion of a society, or in one of the internment camps already being built in all 50 states in America ‘for non-compliant dissidents.’
Elite Envy as a Civilizational Toxin
Despite their wealth, they lack the capacity for simple enjoyment, and consequently, their envy for the rest of us knows no bounds. After all, we continue meeting under festive circumstances, chatting, laughing, dancing, singing, and drinking wine.
Triumph of the ‘Mass-Man’
The Pope cannot afford to be a mass-man, but he is one: unable to understand that his job is not to please his flock but rather to encourage them to become conscious of the historical reality of their own existence.
Two Sides of the Nihilistic Coin
If nothing has intrinsic value and is merely the outcome of human creation in the past, this opens up the exhilarating opportunity to create one’s own values. This is precisely what active nihilists do.
We Approach State Singularity
At state singularity, the state becomes society and society is a product of the state. The rule of law may be acknowledged as important in principle while it is rejected in practice.
The Sorrows of Empire
There is no such thing as fully objective history, and that’s for a simple reason. History is generated in narrative form, and the creation of every narrative—as Hayden White made clear four decades ago—necessarily involves the selection and discarding, as well the foregrounding and relative camouflaging, of items within the panoply of “facts” at the disposal of the historian.
The Confiscation of Reality
Welcome to the age of abstraction, when lived experience is irrelevant and theoretical constructions carry the day – when what is deemed right and true is unmoored from what is actually happening here and now.
Without Community and Boundaries, They Win
If we are to survive as a civilization, that is precisely the kind of community and support structure that we need to form, especially on the local level. For that reason alone, I warmly invite you to the 2024 Brownstone Institute Conference and Gala in my hometown of Pittsburgh, where we will seek to experience a community of collegiality and friendship in service of “The New Resistance.”