Enjoying the view from Limbo
Human society will be imperfect because humans are imperfect. Progressives believe society can be corrected to eliminate the frustrating and limiting social effects human imperfection, by means of intentional and all-pervasive government intervention.
But government is comprised of humans; thus….
As Nietzsche has become far and away the most dominant thinker of the age, his most savage and radical ideas have (as he himself may have foreseen) become trivialized and democratized — a pair of adjectives Nietzsche would have regarded as a redundancy. In other words, what is dominant today is not so much Nietzsche’s own ideas, but his words shrunken in the...
If you see that the world is sick, and understand the sickness as the inevitable result of a toxic way of life, then you cannot help but feel, whenever you catch yourself acting as they do, using their words, or enjoying their pleasures, that you are like one who knowingly infects himself with a virus. In a diseased civilization, to be normal means...
A team is where a boy can prove his courage on his own. A gang is where a coward goes to hide. –Mickey Mantle, The Quality of Courage (Bison Books edition, 1999), 90 Collectivism, as a moral premise, is essentially the denial of the ultimate value, or rather the ultimate existence, of the individual. Individualism, as that term is used all too often...
We live in the age of The Group. Group fear, group laughter, group compliance, group protest. As I have said many times, following Socrates, every crowd is dumber than its dumbest member. “Group activity” and “group thought” are euphemisms for death and stillbirth, respectively. No group achieves more of positive value than any individual member, acting alone or in coordination with one or...
You are not better merely for standing apart — many who stand apart are only fools or fugitives. But neither can you become better until you stand apart. Those in the crowd hate the one who stands apart, because they lack the courage to risk becoming better themselves, and failing — and because they fear being left behind. Nothing angers the crowd more,...
Apart. — Parliamentarianism — that is, public permission to choose between five basic political opinions — flatters and wins the favor of all those who would like to seem independent and individual, as if they fought for their opinions. Ultimately, however, it is indifferent whether the herd is commanded to have one opinion or permitted to have five. Whoever deviates from the five...
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 21, 2019 · Last modified January 11, 2023
Most political calamities in this era of the Politics of Calamity, if one were to analyze them down to their barest elements, would prove to revolve around the problem of the lost individual. This is not surprising, since both of the defining currents of modern politics, totalitarian progressivism and strongman populism, are perspectives which systematically reject the individual soul — its natural needs...
The following, originally published at American Thinker in 2012, was my attempt to offer a synoptic account of the intellectual grounding of modern constitutional republicanism — i.e., political freedom — and of how that grounding is undermined by progressivism. This essay is assigned annually in a required discussion course taught at University of Missouri, where I suppose it has made hundreds of young...
Those who have been forcibly divested of their natural liberty by tyrants must be pitied. They have been coerced into accepting lies of security and state beneficence as paltry compensation for the loss of their birthright of a life worthy of human beings. And yet such wretchedness of external conditions, though destroying a man’s practical life, does not destroy the man. More wretched...
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