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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
Brownstone was founded in light of the above history to shine a light on higher ideals, not a Schmittian war between friends and enemies but societies of compassion, dignity, freedom, rights, and the exercise of human volition against all threats and uses of violence public and private. This is our guiding light now and always. Apocalypticism builds nothing; it only destroys. It’s the instantiation of the philosophy of The Joker. No nation and no community can survive it.
The Fauci Paradox tempts us to allow scientists to regulate science, to Follow the Science and Trust the Experts, but trusting the experts can lead us to our doom as scientists are so prone to short-term ambitions and so limited in their knowledge of other human affairs and longer-term objectives of civilization that, given the opportunity, they are likely to open Pandora’s Box
If you held Lucas’s persuasion, you will re-live all the negative interactions you had with the people of Cole’s persuasion. You will be exposed again to the raw aggression, cruelty, and apathy that you found pervasive during the COVID Pandemic. You will find humor throughout the book for all of the characters. You will laugh out loud at the conclusion.
When we see no repentance but rather a continuation and escalation of the catastrophic policies that got us into this mess, it’s hard to continue to believe it’s just all one big mistake.
