The Samurai faced real physical danger every day of their lives. It seems natural that they would develop a code to deal with death. Maybe we don’t need meditation for death. Maybe we need a meditation on the fear of authoritarianism, and thus garner the courage to carry on.
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.
The establishment consensus on COVID-19 is built on sand and should be challenged. It arose from premature closure of the scientific debate, followed by suppression of contrarian evidence-based analysis. Dissidents include scientists, who are clearly not anti-science but are opposed to flawed science based on ‘low cognitive ability’ and confirmation bias in favour of establishment ideas. They are pushing for better science.
If we had not locked down for “just two weeks,” we wouldn’t have facilitated many more months of closed public spaces, including 18 months of school closures. Letting the Lockdown camel stick its nose under the tent created enduring, creeping momentum for the broader disruption that has dragged on for three years. “Flattening the curve” seemed, to many, temporary, scientific and clever.
The clean vs. dirty distinction was once an indicator of class, perhaps a desiderata of germaphobic pathology, even a harmless eccentricity. But in 2020, the obsession became extreme, an aesthetic priority that overrode all morality and truth. It then became a fundamental threat to liberty, self-government, and human rights.Today this demarcation has invaded the whole of our lives, and it threatens to create a horrifying caste system consisting of those who enjoy rights and privileges vs those who do not and serve (at a distance) the elites.
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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We now endure times of deconstruction that feel unprecedented, crises of confidence in almost all parts of our culture. With institutions crumbling, we may also question the language, the words, that built and sustain these institutions. Many words no longer mean the same or have the same associations — “Left” and “Right; “Liberal” and “Conservative;” “safe” and “free.” Relationships rupture. This rupturing may create openings for new meanings, associations, and alliances.
Too many Americans are gullible and fearful. Many blindly believe what the media presents and thus, suffer from mass delusion and anxiety. The media feels no obligation to tell the truth. To the contrary, news managers deliberately distort and sensationalize information to create alarm and audience/readership. No institution will punish them for their chicanery. Thus, they continually, routinely misrepresent.
Now only two years since its conception, Brownstone Institute has millions of readers and thousands of backers, people who refuse to go along with whatever they are attempting to build in place of the freedoms we once knew. Our successes are many but the job is far from complete. As we approach the anniversary, we should reflect on our successes but also be realistic about the daunting challenges ahead.
The globalist class will continue to burn down the West to prevent their own demise. But while they burn down their own house, we offer hope and joy. We have self-belief, new art, passion, and the huge legacy of the first Enlightenment. On top of that, we have Novak Djokovic.
ChatGPT and the like remind us that machines are not human beings and human beings are not machines. Machines do not approve and disapprove as human beings do. Machines do not have sentiments. They do not have a conscience. They do not have moral responsibility. We do.
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It’s over, that phase of American history, when a bunch of people baptized in the values of the 1960s, could be expected to provide the intellectual framework necessary to move society forward. There is no recovery from what they did, they collaborated with the enemy when the fate of society was on the line. To use their favorite phrase — they became “constitutive of” the predatory system they once sought to critique. Our society is so corrupt that the term “intellectual” no longer has a coherent meaning.
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