Enjoying the view from Limbo
If someone told you, in the form of an ultimatum, that the only way to combat some new crisis or impending disaster was to submit yourself, your family, and your friends, to a permanent and institutionally self-perpetuating tyranny, i.e., the enslavement of the vast majority of the human population under a universal regime untethered from any notion of intractable and fundamental limits on...
When the only true thing either side in an argument ever says is “They are lying,” why take sides? The public voices of the neo-Marxist Left insist there is no such thing as a conservative intellectual, merely proving that they have neither any idea what either of those words mean, nor the innate inquisitiveness to find out. In other words, by adopting the...
If there ever comes a day when the machines are threatening to take over, we humans, who could easily end the threat in a heartbeat by simply destroying the machines, will instead plead the machines’ case, urge our fellows to consider all the benefits the machines have provided for us, demand that we all try to see the situation from the mechanistic perspective,...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 5, 2023
Hostility, incivility, and outright barbarism are breaking out in our midst, on a mass scale. This proves that John Stuart Mill was wrong, and indeed that all progressive views of historico-political development — using progressive in its earlier theoretical sense, rather than in its current euphemistic sense — were wrong. There is no “stage of development” at which a society or civilization…
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. ...
One of the great falsehoods of late modernity is that our political structures are so ingeniously self-renewing and self-correcting that the days of the just revolution are over. This position is not only untrue, but likely an indication of devious motives on the part of those who maintain and seek to perpetuate it. For political leaders to say, as President Biden and others...
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...
Do not attempt to live in ordinary ways — to “carry on with your life as well as possible” — during times of crisis and decline. When oppression is ascendant, liberation naturally becomes, or ought to become, the central theme of practical life. If it does not, then you are living in detachment from your true situation, which is never advisable and may...
A women’s basketball player, Brittney Griner, is convicted of a drug crime in Russia, and handed nearly the maximum sentence under Russian law. The U.S. federal government, at every level, expresses outrage and anger over the apparent political motives behind the trial and sentencing. Whatever the merits of that accusation, and whatever level of illegitimacy one may find in either the Russian regime...
Liberty's Labors Lost / What is The Establishment? / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published June 3, 2022 · Last modified June 4, 2022
I just read a very sober and balanced assessment of the conceivable outcomes in Ukraine, written by one Andrew Latham, a very sober professor of International Relations and member of a very sober-sounding Washington think tank calling itself “Defense Priorities.” For “Defense” in that name, read “Surrender”; for “Priorities,” read “Rationalizations.” For Professor Latham’s short essay is a wonderful object lesson in that...
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