Enjoying the view from Limbo
An American friend — or rather I ought to say the American friend — responding to my recent article, “Democratic Equality 101,” offered the following musing: The entire discussion of “protecting our democracy” here in the USA makes me want to vomit. The purposeful dumbing down of our citizenry is apparent everywhere. A Constitutional Republic was/is intended to be a safeguard against unruly...
I reproduce here, with minor modifications, my reply to a multi-part inquiry from a serious Korean student about the meaning of equality, as that term is used in the context of democratic theory and practice. I have included a few of the student’s own questions (designated with “Q”) from our written exchange, as they form the context for my particular points of emphasis. ...
Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 29, 2022
Love for “nature” in the modern sense grows in inverse proportion to one’s ability to love nature in the ancient sense. That is, if humans today were more interesting, less mindlessly slavish, less devoted to the emptiest pursuits, and more open to the consideration of ideas, beauties, and ways of living truly alternative to those promoted in the popular culture, I would probably...
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 21, 2022 · Last modified March 15, 2023
The internet is a most appropriate, we might almost say idealized, manifestation of late modernity. For, in a perfect crystallization of the age, it democratizes expression, relativizes relevance, and exponentially expands the sense of exposure within the human world, both one’s own exposure to that world and its ubiquitous exposure to oneself. Since, furthermore, the human world is comprised of far more ugliness...
It is standard among today’s professoriate to teach Plato’s Apology with perplexity or mock-sophistication, agonizing over efforts to make sense of the charges against Socrates, seeking to persuade the students (and themselves) that those charges as recorded — impiety and corruption of youth — were “trumped up,” or perhaps merely a cover story for more immediate personal or political motives. For Athens was a...
There is much talk these days of “threats to democracy.” But the greatest threat to democracy today may be the incessant talk of threats to democracy. For a threat is something to fear, and when men are driven by fear, they will sacrifice nobler aspirations in a heartbeat in the name of removing the source of their fear. Beware those who beat the...
The absolute worst and most immoral thing to do would be to assist Ukraine’s effort in its war of self-defense just enough, and just long enough, to heighten the severity of the conflict and ensure that millions of innocent people will be killed or displaced, and then to get skittish, pull back, and become all prudish and pragmatic about not wanting to disrupt...
There is a bias today in favor of simpler, easier-to-understand language. We see it in education systems, in word processing programs’ auto-correct protocols, and in the rise (clever business in an age of school-indoctrinated illiteracy) of for-profit proofreading companies such as Grammarly. Though seemingly apolitical in nature, this ubiquitous impulse to verbal and written simplicity comes from the same ultimate source as the...
I have always scoffed, publicly and privately, at the fanciful notion that the United States “won the Cold War.” No. Ronald Reagan won a battle in that war, but by no means the final battle. Since Reagan’s achievement, the U.S., along with the West in general, has left Russia to freely rearm and develop its strategy for long-term renewal. We are seeing the...
Tyranny is a gossip whispering anxiously about his neighbors. Democracy is a crowd alternately screaming its envy and singing its lust. Freedom is a lively and unconstrained conversation among equals. The tyrant and the democrat are therefore united in their hatred of the free man — the former, because the free man appears impervious to gossip, and is therefore a threat to the...
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