Did Liberalism Fail?
Liberalism unleashes human flourishing and creativity better than any other path in history. But any theory built around the sovereignty of the individual inevitably bumps up against human weakness and human frailty as well.
The True Test of One’s Commitment to Free Speech
Moral emergencies are the times when our principles are most vulnerable to negotiation and even complete collapse.
The Depopulation Bomb: A Halloween Sci-Fi Tale
A plague, a pestilence, a pandemic seemed more promising. Past naturally occurring pandemics had reduced human populations much more successfully than wars. The Black Death of 1346-53 may have reduced the world population by as much as 25 percent, a much more encouraging number than the measly 3 percent from World War II. As an added economic bonus, the Black Death served as a very effective concentrator of wealth for the survivors, as it caused minimal collateral property loss.
Brownstone Institute at Year Three
This period of our lives has shattered the hopes and dreams of millions and billions of people, and practically buried the ideal of freedom as an anachronism in a new age of corporatist totalitarianism. The neo-Hegelians in our midst condescend to us and say that this is just how things are and there is nothing to be done about it. This is not true.
Covid Amnesty: Is Mercy the Answer?
Until we have meaningful reconciliation, amnesty will merely cement the incumbents’ hold on academic, media, and narrative power, all but ensuring we repeat the failures of pandemic public health policy. Thus, for those of us who anticipated the harms to kids, we can further anticipate the harms of granting mercy to those whose trembling, intolerant hands still hold the cannons.
Thomas Hobbes’s Philosophy Made Real
Considering these “rights which make the essence of sovereignty,” it does not take too much of a mental stretch to conclude that we live at a time when these have been appropriated by governments worldwide, essentially leaving political subjects with no rights or recourse like that which they (believed they) enjoyed before.
On Broken Friendships
No matter what their basis or origin, friendships—and close relationships with selected kin—entail exchanging perceptions of the world and life. In so doing, friends influence each other’s thinking, even without trying to. Listening to friends or favored family members, or listening to ourselves talk to them, can also help us to figure out what’s true. Or at least what feels good to believe or say.
Is Serfdom Humanity’s Default?
The real problem is that, as our fellow Americans wind their way blithely down the road to serfdom, they are taking the rest of us with them. Because we cannot have a country in which some are allowed to live freely, according to their own lights, assuming the concomitant risks, while others are “guaranteed” a life free only from such decisions and responsibilities.
The Left Needs to Find Itself
The new movement of cancellation, vilification, exclusion, and abuse is not a left or right movement. It promotes a form of totalitarianism closer to fascism than anything else, whilst calling others “fascist” for valuing free thought and free association. Fascism is not a synonym for freedom; it has a different and unpleasant meaning.
The Drumbeat of Trauma-Inducing Events in Our Lives
If left unaddressed, the top-down trauma our “leadership” class seems bent on serially inflicting upon us leads to widespread psychic numbing and a nation of people who learn to comport themselves in the fearful and overly circumspect ways of that “dog that’s been beat too much.”
The Drumbeat of Trauma-Inducing Events in Our Lives Read More
The Complicity of Compliance
Agents are individuals. Only individuals make moral choices. You are one. Agendas are products of the agency of individuals other than you. For that reason, to choose compliance over conscience is simply to sacrifice your agency for someone else’s – and your morality, too.
Awaken Aletheia!
We have access today to more information from more parts of the globe than we have had at any previous point in human history, and we spend hours every day perusing it; but for all that, our ability to meaningfully absorb and verify what we take in seems — if anything — to have diminished. And yet, somehow, it seems the more that we lose contact with our ability to know what’s real, the more intractable we grow in our opinions, and the more we cling to the spurious conviction that we understand the complex world we live in.