Enjoying the view from Limbo
There is more life and sincere exertion of real power in a random blade of grass than is exhibited by any statesman today. There is more discovery in the way a morning breeze can draw the discrete perceptions of many days into a unified experience in the mind than in all the public school textbooks being ground into the immobilized souls occupying today’s...
The specialist’s mind.— The problem with specialists, as Socrates reasoned with perfect clarity, and as modernity exhibits ubiquitously, is that the specialist knows about one thing, but through a combination of the pride of competence and the disproportion of exclusive focus, gradually comes to imagine that the one thing he knows is the lynchpin of all reality, such that he mistakes his extremely...
People with an inclination to rule are always keen to control and delimit the thoughts and attitudes of others as a means of protecting the exclusivity of their right to rule. Just as our tyrannical advocates of “lockdowns” and “stay-at-home orders” like to declare exceptions for “essential workers,” as this allows them to set the terms for all mankind regarding which work is...
Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 18, 2021 · Last modified April 19, 2021
If you want freedom, you must fight for it. Let us examine the meaning of “fighting.” Vladimir Putin ordered his most prominent and popular Russian critic, Alexei Navalny, murdered by poison, as has been his standard operating procedure in dealing with all political opponents throughout his thinly-veiled dictatorship. The dying Navalny was transported to Germany so that doctors there could save his life....
It is always our condition. It is never avoidable. As you move into the fog, you begin to make out the details of what had once seemed impenetrable, and enjoy a moment’s relief from the nervous sense of being lost in your isolation. Then, however, if you are honest, you realize that these newly defined near details merely mask a new set of...
The heart of statistical propaganda is the calculated citing of ominous-sounding numbers without any clarifying context, which is to say without those numbers being subsumed within an attempt to provide knowledge, but instead isolated so as to provoke hysteria of the sort that cries out for saving action, any action, from anyone who promises to alleviate the panic state, if only you will...
When the world is what we see.– Clouds dominate our horizon, block our view, obscure the light, and cast doubt on all our plans. In truth, however, the sky is immeasurably wider than the clouds — the clouds merely appear vast because they are so much closer to us than the sky. All one needs to correct this problem of perspective is to...
Experts, contrary to the popular connotation of that word, are simplifiers. More precisely, at their worst, which is to say at their most expert, they are simplistic people who, for the sake of their egos or to assuage their insecurities (or both), carefully and systematically evade the unknown — which is to say almost everything — by reducing the complexity of the cosmos...
Plato’s allegory of the cave (Republic, Bk. VII) is the most memorable and detailed presentation of a belief that was essentially shared by classical thinkers in general, namely that a societally constructed view of reality is a necessary condition of life for all humans, although a minority of men may gradually, through a painful process of spiritual reorientation, begin to find their way...
An expert is a person we are supposed to believe because what he says is science, and therefore true. Likewise, any self-proclaimed expert, meaning anyone who accepts that public designation and thus grants himself the authority to be trusted as such, assumes that his own statements should be believed because what he says is science, and therefore true. And yet every single example...
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