The philosopher Isaiah Berlin starts his 1953 essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” with this perplexing proverb attributed to the Greek poet Archilochus. Berlin goes on to explain that there are two types of thinkers: hedgehogs, who see the world through the lens of a “single central vision,” and foxes, who pursue many different ideas, seizing upon a variety of experiences and explanations simultaneously.
And his ruinous speech/diatribe defending himself that came off more like “old man yells at clouds” than “elder statesman,” Senor Biden is taking big hits left and right. And the knives are fully out for him and in plain view. No one is hiding anymore.
We’ve lived through this and seen too much to have the same level of trust we once had. What can we do? We can rebuild the ideal as it existed in the old world. The kind of genius we know was on display in a place like Salamanca, or in interwar Vienna, or even in the coffee houses of London in the 18th century, can return, even if on a small level. They have to, simply because the shape of the world around us depends fundamentally on the ideas we hold about ourselves and the world around us. Those should not be for sale to the highest bidder.
We dare not comply with this mandatory forgetting. We must remember, and take full account of the deception and destruction the ruling class has caused for no other reason than profits and power. Only then we can learn the right lessons and rebuild on a better foundation for the future.
The transformation of the Air Force Academy (AFA) from a military institution to a progressive, liberal arts school has been incremental, relentless, and calculated. The goal to politicize the training and perspectives of cadets, who constitute about 20% of annual Air Force officer commissions, guarantees a source of influential officers who will apply and promote these ideas throughout their military and civilian careers.
This is the path toward change. The driving force of history is not impersonal but rather comes down to the actions of people informed by the beliefs they hold. This is why governments throughout history have placed such a high priority on controlling the public mind.
At its recent Davos annual meeting, the WEF focused much of its attention on how to respond to the fictional “Disease X.” This alarmist concern about an imaginary threat follows hard on the heels of the still-unfolding worldwide devastation wrought by extreme “solutions” to a grossly exaggerated disease threat.
As I write this, medicine is still “In the Wilderness,” but I can see a brightening horizon. We still need to formulate a counter to the nihilism of Postmodernism and Critical Theory. We still need to re-establish free speech and intellectual freedom in healthcare delivery and education. We still need to raise truth above ideology. But I now think that is a possibility.
The Complexity Science of Medicine Requires Freedom Read More
If the past four years have taught us anything, it is that you “elites” are awful people. Your ideas are awful. Your vision for the future is awful. The society you wish to create, with yourselves in charge, would be unspeakably awful. We reject it, and we reject you. So go away and leave us alone—or else suffer the consequences.
As election season rolls on and the nation looks set for an election re-match between the mandate ordering Joseph Biden and the lockdown ordering Donald Trump, a sense of nostalgia for a lost and forgotten era has creeped into my thoughts. For my nostalgia’s sake at least, that was a long time ago, and it never really happened anyway.
The Economist article points out that deaths of despair now impact nearly every demographic group (not just the poor whites studied by Case and Deaton). But it never mentions Covid nor the Covid lockdowns that The Economist championed in 2020.
In more and less formal ways, COVID was the tool that transformed our supposedly inalienable right to make informed choices about our private lives into a public and readily dispensable good. It was almost as if we had built such a network of infinitesimal choices creating the powerful illusion of choice that we didn’t notice when we were asked to give it all up in an instant.
